Philoking.com

I need a brush up on some .net coding against web services and decided to play around with Twitter a little bit.

I decided to take a somewhat nefarious route and game Twitter a little bit. I sat at my computer last night for a few hours, by this morning I had the Follower Farmer (no I won’t release it, that’s not the point.)

What does it do you ask? Well it pings the public time-line, it get’s the latest 20 screen names, it follows all of them under my account, and then it waits two whole minutes and then un-follows them. Amazingly enough upwards of 20% of the random strangers follow me back!

I don’t know them, they don’t know me. They have no interest in my content and have really no clue what I write about. Regardless I picked up over 100 followers in a few hours.

It’s this little experiment that makes me wonder if there is any hope for Twitter after it attempts to monetize itself.

I know I won’t pay anything to use it. Many of my friends and colleagues agree. Have you ever followed someone who randomly invited you? Someone you knew nothing about? Interesting….

There is a funny phenomenon on blogs and sites like Digg.com. People lose their damned minds. I don’t know about you, but I have pretty good manners when it comes to dealing with people.

Today I received a comment on an old post of mine that convinced me to write this post. Thank you Mr. Bryan Blevins for his lovely comment, it goes something like this:

I had a hard time installing OS X Leopard. Turns out there was a bug with an app called Clear Dock that totally hosed my install. After two failed attempts, I had to do an archive install, reinstall all of my applications, copy over all of my data and re-create all of my personal settings. I don’t know about you but I call that a pain in the ass. I blogged my experience with the title “My day of hell installing OS X Leopard” and I thought it was. I spent 8 hours getting my laptop back to usable.

http://www.philoking.com/2007/10/26/my-day-of-hell-installing-os-x-leopard/

So today, Mr. Blevins spoke up to tell me what he thought of the difficulty I had:

“Oh Jesus H. Christ! Are you kidding me? You had a DAY of HELL installing Leopard? Box up your computer and send it back to Apple, ’cause you’re too stupid to own a computer.

My install of Leopard took 20 minutes tops, on a system nearly the same as yours.

You had to endure a boring screen for an hour. Oh the horror, how did you ever survive?”

So what I take from this is that:

1. 8 hours of getting your computer back to working is a walk in the park and should be not only accepted but embraced as part of the Apple experience.
2. Since his install too 20 minutes on similar hardware, any issues I encounter are no longer valid.
3. Even though the bug was caused by another program and later recognized by Apple as a bug that affected thousands of users, I should give up all of my computers because not being able to overcome the bug on install day is obviously a leading indicator of my knowledge with computers.

Now I don’t think that’s quite fair, but that’s another issue. The question I have is if I had met Mr. Blevins in public, would he have spoke to me with such disdain and animosity? Reading through a few comments on Digg.com and you would think that the internet is inhabited with sociopaths. If you want to read more you should check out some of my articles where I dared to say I didn’t like a particular game or said something bad about Linux. You would think I was the anti-christ blogging about burning newborn babies.

In this rarest of cases, Brian was nice enough to supply me with his email address. Since I am betting that he did not subscribe to my feed (who wants to hear what such an idiot has to say) I will email him a link to this post and maybe he’ll come back to attack me again.

Chill out dude, so I didn’t like my experience installing OS X, I love Macs so you don’t have to hit me with your fanboy hate.

You might be surprised by this little fact, but I have been in the newspaper business twice in my life. Once in advertising design, and once as an owner of a weekly newspaper. I don’t think that makes me an expert on print, but I do think it gives me a unique perspective given I live and breath the web every day in my personal and professional life.

Why in the world do I think that the Seattle P.I. can succeed where so many others have failed? There are actually two main reasons as well as some awesome opportunities. Last month the Seattle Post Intelligencer had 1.8 million unique viewers with over 30 million page views. That’s some significant traffic on any website, but if you stop to consider the scope…I bet upwards of 50% were from this area…that’s monstrous. The circulation becomes equivalent to the New York Times which is read the world over.

With such an enormous reader base, the newspaper only needs to concentrate on two things, quality content and innovation. Think about it, before writers were told “write me 800 words about this.” Of course there are still limits to how long an article could be interesting, but with no real hard limit on size, images, multimedia inclusions, links and user feedback and commentary, the Seattle P.I. could truly be the first REAL online newspaper that embraces the web as it exists today and become a model for the rest of the newspapers who are in reality waiting in line for their number to be called. Print will die, I am sorry.

Of course we will keep fancy books and such, but magazines, newspapers, newsletters and such are dead, they just don’t know it yet.

Outside of fantastic traffic, the content is really good. They have reached out to some unique writers and perspectives and create can’t miss content. My suggestions as they make this transition would be the following:

1. Don’t use sites like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News as a model. They suck.
2. Embrace the community with real conversations around stories.
3. Make your writers transparent and reachable via Twitter, blogs, etc.
4. Reach out to the local blog talent and reprint great stories on relevant topics.
5. Don’t become an online entity, still get out in the community and make your presence known.

Take it and run, create the model and then stand on top. That’s what I would do.

I have only been using Twitter regularly for about a month. While I am totally enjoying it, this article on Adage.com brings me to a crossroads on where I feel Twitter fits in. Right now I have about 75 friends on Facebook and about 50/140 (Following/Followers) on Twitter. The interesting thing about them? They are mutually exclusive. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter that I communicate with on Facebook and vice-versa, with exception of two Channel-Flippers. (Great web video!) Why is that? Because with little exception, I don’t know anyone on Twitter personally and know everyone on Facebook on a personal level. I am not sure I am a representative user of either service, but I use Facebook for friends and family and Twitter for blog and business.

I post photos of my wife and son, I wall talk with my mom, things that have no business publicly broadcast on Twitter. The same goes for Twitter, I am sure that my last Tweet “philoking: someone give me a twitterific way to give away one of the cool retro MS-DOS shirts….” is of very little interest to my sister or cousins.

I think that it’s this type of segregation that will be the defining line between the two services. I sincerely hope that Facebook doesn’t go too far into the weeds trying to define delicate privacy settings that have group/user access and become way to cumbersome. While I am sure Facebook want’s Twitter’s market, I love that I can use two services and not have to worry, even to the point that I can link my Status messages together. Currently my straight status messages go to Facebook but replies do not and that’s a great compromise for me.

Facebook is full of “look at my cat” (guilty) and I just stumped my toe kind of stuff, which is the fastest way to get un-followed by me on Twitter. Those types of posts have sentimental value when they come from your sister, but they aren’t very interesting coming from a stranger.

Now if LinkedIn takes a stab at Twitter, that might be interesting, unfortunately for them, I think it’s probably too late.

No, I don’t mean how would you use Facebook or Myspace at work. If there was a social network that allowed you to keep up with and communicate with your co-workers, what would you expect?

This isn’t a blog to tell you what I think it should be, but to solicit opinion and commentary. What I would be totally interested in doing, is having some of my readers write guest posts about this topic to further spread the conversation. Of course I have many thoughts on this subject, but let’s hear yours and I’ll spill some of mine as the discussion progresses.