It’s a great feeling when someone goes out of their way to recognize you as a resource for great insight and connection on Twitter. Recognition for being someone worth following is great for those trying to figure out the point of Twitter.

However, the common practice for a typical #followfriday tweet is to pack as many of your favorite followers into 140 as possible. While this strategy is great for pinging people in your network to let them know you’re thinking of them, it also can appear cheap and potentially a little off putting if the group of folks you include don’t have much in common.

Now, it’s rare that folks are actually offended by being included in a #followfriday. Most do in fact love to be included and recognized in some way by their followers. Some may even get a few new followers because of the referral.

As with most situations in life, however, #followfriday offers people the opportunity to cut through the noise with valuable tweets that create signal and meaning for folks.

The #1 Secret to Follow Friday Success
Something folks love even more than simply having their Twitter handle included in a mass #ff tweet is when someone devotes an entire tweet to something they specifically peg as a reason to follow somebody.

By taking an extra five minutes to break apart your #ff tweets and doing individual #ff tweets instead, you’re showing your followers that you value something specific about what they’re doing. It’s another level of respect you’re paying forward to the folks you value in your Twitter stream.

Rules
1) Use the entire 120 or so characters (How to Get Retweeted – The Formula) to describe something specific and amazing about the people whose tweets you value the most. For my handle (@dayneshuda) I can get away with leaving 15 characters available.

2) Include #ff

3) Include a Website (preferably the actual URL vs. a shortened version…for branding)

4) Give a specific reason for people to follow

Examples

Benefits of Going the Extra Mile
I’ve been trying to do this each Friday (although I do miss some) for some of my favorite folks on Twitter and the response has been wonderful and more than I could have imagined.

The folks that I highlight in detailed #followfridays are generally very thankful to be highlighted in a specific way. They seem to appreciate that someone takes the time to recognize their hard work in a field or for being a great friend and someone worth following because of their personality.

Sometimes in response (but never expected) folks have responded with similar, detailed tweets about me. It’s a nice little bonus for making the gesture.

What about your #ff experiences?

Do you leave detailed #ff tweets or the more popular styled #ff tweets?

What are some pros and cons of each?

Related articles on Twitip

#followfriday Revolution

Did @PhilBaumann Just Save Follow Friday?

Follow Friday; Too Much of a Good Thing?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

The #1 Secret to Follow Friday Success

To be sure, some of those issues involve Twitter itself earning Team TweetDeck kudos for dealing with the limitations of the Twitter platform. After all, it isn’t easy coming up with the next earth-shattering, must have, whiz-bang feature when the platform you’re dependent upon not always reliable. It’s also no small challenge when your primary competitor, Seesmic, is aggressively introducing new features (listen to Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur give me Exclusive Seesmic News during my podcast interview last week on Addicted to Social Media).

And yet, there’s still so much more I want to get out of TweetDeck. What follows is my TweetDeck Wish List. While some of these features may indeed be on TweetDeck’s product road map, I’m hoping Iain and the team might see the light and implement at least a few of the others.

My TweetDeck Wish List

1.    Collapse Columns Instead of Closing

Problem: I’m currently running twenty-two (22!) columns for a variety of clients and purposes. However, while TweetDeck is more stable than it used to be, it still uses a lot of system resources and slows down my computer. Also, having so many columns is inefficient and distracting. The only way to reduce the number of columns I have to close them. Not a good solution.

Too Many Columns? Hell, yes! (Actual screen shot)

Solution: Allow users to collapse, or minimize columns without closing them, like they can do with applications.

2.    Grouping Columns

Problem: I manage the Twitter accounts for several clients and need to monitor a lot of different activity for each one. Consequently, I need to have many columns open at any given time. For example, I need to see all of the tweets I’ve sent, @ Replies, DMs and New Followers. I also have multiple active searches for things like specific tweeters relevant to the client and keyword searches. As mentioned above, this is inefficient and distracting.

Solution: The ability to group columns into a single Macro-Group, then being able to open, close or minimize that group, would be a tremendous efficiency booster.

Grouped and Labeled Tabs

3.    Add Labels and Icons to Buttons in the Column Navigator

Problem: The introduction of the Column Navigator was a huge usability improvement. However, it just wasn’t implemented effectively for two reasons:
1.    The buttons are too small and I’m constantly clicking on the wrong ones.
2.    The popup that identifies the buttons is slow and inefficient.

Solution: The buttons need to have labels and icons for quick identification. There is more than enough room in the Column Navigator space to allow for much larger buttons. However, I would prefer TweetDeck switch to a Tab metaphor like web browsers now use and like Excel has been using practically since its introduction. Tabs allow, at a glance, for users to know where they are and to find what they need quickly, easily and painlessly. Then, if they want to see additional statistics for each column, moving their curser over a Tab to display a popup would be acceptable.

4.    Drag and Drop reordering of columns

Problem: I’m constantly moving columns into new positions. Unfortunately, clicking the tiny “Move column” buttons on the bottom of each column only allows me to move a single column by one column position at a time. It’s also agonizingly slow.

Dragging Columns

Solution: Dragging and Dropping has been a user feature in applications for years. Even many websites offer that capability. Dragging and Dropping is simple and quick way to move columns into new positions.

5.    Resize Column Width

Problem: All of my columns are the same size and they don’t need to be. Sometimes just a sliver large enough to see someone’s avatar is enough to show me that there are new tweets from them. Meanwhile, I would love to widen other columns to make it easier to see more tweets.

Solution: Let users customize the width of each column.

6.    Change Font Size in Columns

Problem: It should be obvious from the suggestions above that column space is at a premium in TweetDeck and that some columns are just more important than others. Users need another tool to help them find the tweets or tweeters they’re looking for.

Solution: Allow users to change the font size of tweets in a specific column, or from specific tweeters. This would allow users to increase the number of tweets in a column (if font size is reduced) or allow tweets from specific tweeters standout (if font size is enlarged), thus improving efficiency.

7.    Stack Columns

Problem: Some of my columns don’t get a lot of traffic, or I simply don’t need to monitor them as closely. In order to save screen space it would be great to be able to stack two or three columns into a single column.

Solution: Let users drag multiple columns and stack them into a single column.

8.    Threaded Conversations

Problem: It is next to impossible to follow conversations in TweetDeck. Unless tweets are directly adjacent to one another, I don’t know who said what when. I often find myself opening Tweetie or Echofon on my iPhone to dig into conversations.

Solution: Add a button to indicate that there is a conversation and that could then be used to expand a tweet to make that entire conversation visible.

9.    Icons to Identify if Someone is Following me Back.

Problem: It’s great that TweetDeck shows the number of followers a user has below their avatar, but I often have no idea if they’re following me back.

Solution: An icon as simple as a dot next to the follower count would let me know if the tweeter is following me.

10.    Who’s Online Now Column

Problem: Because of the large number of people I follow, unless someone is actively tweeting, I often don’t know if they are actually online. What’s more, due to the proliferation of tweet scheduling tools, someone may not even be online even if I do see their tweets.

Solution: A column showing a list of everyone who is actually online. Note that an icon next their avatar within a tweet won’t work because of the aforementioned problems finding tweets. I could do a search, but again, I don’t want to open unnecessary columns and that would not show me everyone at once.

There, that’s ten. Since a friend of mind constantly complains that my posts are too long, I’ll stop here. However, if you would like to read about nine more features I’d like to see in TweetDeck, check out my blog.

In the meantime, I’d love to what features you want to see in TweetDeck. Let me know in the comments.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

10 Features I Want to See in TweetDeck

It’s not the first time I’ve had the question asked, so I thought what better way to answer it than by sharing it with everyone here on Twitip.

Absolutes Don’t Exist

I’ll first be honest in saying that there isn’t a black and white answer, and this isn’t something that can be solved without testing. Too many people treat Twitter with black and white answers… with absolutes.

But there aren’t any absolutes.

Instead of looking for a perfect answer, why not claim every name that interests you and play around with them?

The task of playing around with multiple usernames on TweetDeck might be enough to convince you that you can’t manage more than one.

Or…

In playing with one for each niche, you find that it’s perfect for what you’re trying to do.

My Questions

But you still need help getting there, so let’s start with a few basic questions…

Do you plan on selling the associated domain at any time?

If so, then I recommend creating a new account for your domain/niche. Many companies will want the associated Twitter account when it comes time to sell, and at worst, it creates an additional asset that you can use to beef up the valuation of your web property.

Are we comparing apples or oranges?

If you’re trying to decide if you should have a different Twitter name for two different websites in the same niche, then I saw why not create an umbrella that owns them both and then start Tweeting from there?

If you’re trying to decide whether you should use one name for your personal blog and another for your basketweaving website, then I’ll ask you this… do you talk about basket weaving on your blog?

If not, then go with 2… at least try them. If you do, then you’re good with your own name.

Are you cross-linking your websites?

Look, if you plan on linking them all together anyway, then I don’t see any sense in creating one for each website. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is, and I’m guessing that the content will cross over between the two…so save yourself some effort and keep it under a single umbrella.

If you aren’t associating the websites with each other, then you either need to use your name as a global brand, or create one for each niche.

That being said… how effective is it to create a Twitter name for fencing swords? I’m not sure…why not play around and find out?

Common Sense Prevails

I’d like to sit here and pretend that I hold the keys to Twitter salvation, but the truth is that there aren’t any keys.

The best way to figure out what works, not only for you, but for your business, is to get out and try it. Only you know what works for you…and unless you spend time seeing if Virginia Bed and Breakfasts can attract a Twitter following, then how will you know?

Regardless of what these “social media experts” tell you, there isn’t a right answer. We’re still early on in the game, and things are changing rapidly. What worked yesterday might not work tomorrow… so keep that in mind. Be flexible, be fluid, and be patient.

Do that, and you’ll be just fine.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

One Name or Two? Let’s Find Out

YOU vs. ME
Consider this. Are you using “I” or “we” more than “you” and “your”? Likewise, how much to do you enjoy sitting with someone, a stranger perhaps, and listening to them talk all about themselves and how wonderful they or their business are? Not very much. That’s the way sales via Twitter come across. If you’re constantly talking about yourself, not sharing information or news, etc. people will start to tune you out and your following will dwindle.

Presentation is Everything
This is not to say that you can’t participate in business and foster relationships on Twitter and beyond. You can, but presentation is everything.

As with most communication in life, the way we say/present comments has the power to drastically change the conversation.

Consider this… if a parent told their child they were an accident, the child could bear feelings of sadness or feel like they weren’t/aren’t wanted. Instead, if the parent said they were a surprise, the child could feel special or just accept it and move on. It’s a simple change, but words (and phrases) have power.

Power to Stir Emotion
As mentioned above, words have the power to stir emotion. Written correctly, a tweet can lead to a positive, emotionally-based response. Perhaps you’re filling a void, fixing a problem or offering a solution. These could all lead to thanks, follows and RTs. Emotion is involved in everything we do, use it carefully.

Power to Elicit a Bond
Similarly, words and communication have the power to elicit a bond. This is the hope of all Twitter users – to be connected to someone else. It could be as simple as attending or being a fan of the college or sharing similar interests. In terms of using this for business, Fiskers and their Fiskateers are a great example. See our blog post about Spike Jones’ presentation or visit their site. People unite around common interests.

Power for Good and Power for Evil (aka uselessness in this case)
Twitter has the power to be good and be used well or the power to be useless blips of non-information. Consider what you tweet and when you share it. Does it relate to things you usually talk about? That’s what you’re followers are interested in. Is it timely and provide information or resources or is it like those horrible forwarded emails from Aunt Gert that you delete before reading?

A good examples of using the power of Twitter for good are the mass amounts of money raised for Haiti after the earthquake. Thousands of quick RTs will lead to the aid of many more.

Conversely, a bad example is that of the tweet by the first person Conan O’Brien followed – recently amassing +18,000 followers – “yumm… Twizzlers”. I bet all her followers were happy to receive that.

Be mindful and consider your tweets and posts before sending them out to the web. If you’re representing a business or product/service, don’t push, push, push until you push everyone away. Engage with them. Talk to people and determine their interests and perhaps some you share. Fostering a relationship leads to communication – the real kind.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

HOW you are Communicating is Almost as Important as WHAT you are Communicating.

Since I also VLOG for the beauty industry, I get pampered like no other male Mexican alive. I review spas, beauty treatments and sometimes get to try new beauty advances like eye-lash extensions–yes, they exist. Well, there I was staring into the looking glass – not recognizing myself when I tweeted a before-and-after photo of myself with and without the extensions provided by Wink Eyelash. Several of my followers wanted details, “Where do I get mine?” “Give us the address!” and “Did it hurt?” But in the mixture of all the happy tweets came one lonely tweet that left me confused, dazed and bewildered, “I’m a married woman with children you PERVERT! Stop sending me this trash!” Did she confused me with someone else? See for yourself – click here for the photo I’d posted. I tweeted back, “I’m not sure why you think I’m flirting with you but I’m not.” And in a flash, several of my followers joined in and tweeted in my defense. The exchanges were flying higher than Amy Winehouse after a crackfest. I asked everyone to stop tweeting the woman and just blocked her. Well, in the morning, I had 10 evil tweets from her husband threatening to hurt me and my new eyelashes.

Three weeks ago, I received a call from a Literary Agent asking me for a meeting, as it turns out, she found me through twitter and had been reading my blog and now wanted to work on a “blog-to-book” deal. We met the following week, exchanged ideas and are moving forward with the project. After the meeting, and after keeping my followers in suspense, I let the cat out of the bag and tweeted about the book deal. I received so many congratulating tweets and since I follow my own advice on engaging with my followers, I tweeted people back saying thank you. But since there were so many, I did it in clumps. And if you follow me, you know me and my off-beat sense of humor; one group got, “Thanks for the support! This Mexican hearts YOU!” another received “Yay! You all ROCK now get back to work!” and the last group got, “Yay, Skanks! We did it!” Wouldn’t you know, I immediately got tweets that said, “Yay! I’m a Nando skank!” and “Nando skank for life!” but in the mixture was, “Don’t you ever call me a skank, you will speak to me with respect!” I didn’t recognize the name, but I replied, “Child, if you follow me, you gotta get used to the Mexican, I ain’t changing for no one.” And she replied, “I’m not a child, I am a grown woman and will be treated as such.” I clicked on her page, she wasn’t following me nor I her. What was she doing retweeting my happy-book-deal-tweet in the first place? (But that’s another article) I saw she had 30 followers and was following 150. I hate to be a twitter snob, but I had a feeling she didn’t know how to use twitter and mistook this forum as a Jerry Springer message board; I blocked her. Later in the day, I went back to her page–cause I’m a nosy Mexican–and discovered it was full of tweets to her 30 followers on how she “had to put a punk in his place.” I also noticed that she had a few negative tweets about other twitter-ers as well. I believe her bio said she was a motivational speaker and author.

I’m sure you’re thinking, is twitter really a place to call your followers skanks? Well, it is over in NANDOISM world – because I have the best followers ever… but just for the record, I haven’t used the word skanks since then – but the point is, even if you didn’t like what I tweeted, send me a DM, ask for an e-mail address, or even request a phone call, but to start using twitter to infect the information super highway with your negative thoughts and then to rally others in your cause is just bad. Twitter fights are wrong for three reasons.

1. Negative tweets discredit your  status. No one will really take you serious if your a dating blogger ranting and raving or complaining about your day. I don’t have time to read your negative tweets. I was casted as the main character of my own telenovella 34 years ago and don’t need your constant negativity. And in her case, an author? I don’t want to read her stuff.

2. Twitter Fights make you look petty. A friend of mine, @TheUngayGuy got celebrity twitter-er @KirstieAlley all wound up and fuming when he snarkly remarked about scientologists traveling to Haiti with e-meters rather than medicine. That twitter fight got ugly because Kirstie went mad crazy, used profanity and extremely vulgar language to get her point across – but in the end, it cost her thousands of twitter followers.

3. Just leaves a bad digital footprint. With everything being indexed and easily linked to your name, accounts, online persona, why leave a digital footprint the size of big foot associated with online fights? It may seem like a worthy cause at the moment, but in the long run, the very long run, it will leave a damaging effect that’ll haunt you possibly making you lose clients, followers and friends.

So the next time you feel the heat of a twitter fight coming on – take a deep breath, eat a donut, or just take a break from the internet because the cost is just too high. Have you seen twitter fights in your stream? How do you react to them?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

How to Fight on Twitter

To announce the event of following someone randomly Conan tweeted “I’ve decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.” That was the best part of the story and after that Sarah has been rubbing her status next to celebrities with lots of tv interviews and MTV appearances.

From just 3 followers to over 20000 followers (at the time of writing this post) she is growing and she is growing fast. At the personal level, she and her fiancé had been announcing the amount of gifts they have been receiving after Conan made them famous.

After the famous out cry even Sarah’s Mom has come on the twitter and named her account promptly as Sarahkmom. Who knows Conan may even follow her.

Kinda cool, eh? She’s been on all sorts of news programs now, and getting tons of attention. On Good Morning America this morning, Sarah’s fiancé announced a request that Conan be the best man at his wedding!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Conan Meets Sarah – A Cute Story

I was baffled for a moment until I ran across a follower whose profile only had a repeating rotation of the same tweets, posted at the same times everyday from an API. In fact, I couldn’t find anything recent that hadn’t come from the API. This person hadn’t posted anything live in months. Almost everything there was either spam or blatant self promotion. No replies or interactions with other users, no original non-link posts of his own – I began to wonder, is this even real human? And worse, if I continued scheduling all of my tweets is this what people will find when they venture to my profile?

As if that wasn’t enough of a sign, that very same day someone in my stream posted something to the effect of: “I can’t hear you over all these APIs!” I can’t remember who said this, but I got the message. It was an eye-opening experience and made me rethink my practices and the purposes for scheduling tweets in the first place. But clearly, there are some benefits to scheduling that your followers will actually appreciate.

1. To allow you to spread your tweets throughout the day:
Scheduling tweets can be a good thing, it allows you to spread your tweets over the course of a day without flooding the Twittersphere with back-to-back tweets. I find it annoying when one person decides to dump a thousand tweets in row and then leave. So what you’ve only got a few minutes to log on, interact and reply to all your @mentions. You’re hogging up the airwaves! No one else can get through and really after the 8th or 9th tweet in a row, no one’s listening to you anymore anyway.

So schedule your tweets so that you can spread them out evenly so you don’t over-tweet in a short period of time. I do this especially when I’ve got several replies or RTs that I want to post – it allows me to still interact with others, but without dominating all the space. They still see their mentions and no one has to complain because my face keeps popping up and drowning everyone else out.

2. To allow you to tweet during peak hours:
This always you to be more visible at a time when more people are actually there to notice your tweets. If you know you won’t be available during those high traffic times, schedule your tweets so that they appear then. But don’t schedule them at exactly the same time every single day. It’s okay to post a tweet at 5:22pm, it doesn’t have to always be 5:00pm. If you have several tweets to post, spread them out – schedule no less than 15 minutes apart. Your followers will thank you for that.

Scheduling tweets is not a substitute for authentically engaging others on Twitter, it simply makes it easier for you to do so in the least evasive way. You should still respond to and retweet other’s updates/content. At least 50% of what you tweet should be someone else’s work, although 60% is probably better.

So which API platform is the best to use for scheduling tweets? I’ve been using HootSuite – it’s multi-dimensional and allows me also to schedule updates for Facebook and other social network sites. I love it the most because it allows me to have access to all of my favorite social sites in one neat place.

What is your favorite Twitter API with scheduling capabilities?

Are there other valid (non-annoying) reasons for scheduling tweets that I’ve overlooked here?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

To Schedule Tweets or No? Two Reasons You Should.

Monitor and Listen First
Perform searches to find out which of your audience members and readers are on Twitter. Follow them and “listen” for places where technical documentation solves something they’re working on. I wouldn’t suggest that you interrupt conversations as they happen just yet, though. Don’t be the automatic tweeter who says “You were just talking about my company’s software? Check out my company’s help site!” Try to monitor just to get a sense of your readers and who might potentially follow you. After you set up notifications for keywords on search.twitter.com, read through what is being said about either your company, your products, or the subject matter related to your business. Listen, understand the overall sentiment, and then form an idea of who your audience could be. You can’t formulate what you want to say on Twitter until you can hear others first, and understand the flow of information and conversation there.

Play your Part
As a technical communication pro, are you a conversationalist or a guide? On Inc.com you can read about the 8 types of people who belong on Twitter. These types are: personality, guide, brand watchdog, customer support rep, publisher, promotion channel, conversationalist, and finally, the curious.

Only a subset of those types match the job description for most technical communicators. I would suggest customer support representative, guide, conversationalist, the curious and the publisher make sense for technical writers. The brand watchdog and personality considerations may belong in other areas for your company. Your company may already be monitoring and responding to customer support or service requests that come in through Twitter, and you don’t want to over step your bounds into the harshtag area (such as #fail)!

Give More than You Get
Use Twitter posts to link to documentation with longer explanations for a new feature. Basically tweet out the release notes, one feature at a time. Use hash tags to indicate the product name and version. Refer to “Twitter as a medium for release notes“, an experiment by Sarah Maddox, a technical writer with Atlassian. She walks through their process and the results.
Timing and the correct amount of “pause” between posts are relevant decisions here. Do not “flood” a hashtag with tweets about your release notes – readers don’t necessarily want to be overwhelmed with messages.

Be a guide to the overall architecture of your help system by tweeting not just links, but how to find the information they need. Don’t just feed followers, teach them to fish.
Tweet about tutorials on the site and also offer to answer questions about a tutorial.
Be a point of contact for answering questions. If you get stuck, refer to a customer support rep who knows how to properly deflect conflict and answer questions.

Measure
How will you know if your Twitter techniques are working? You should see a steady growth of followers. You want to also monitor the amount of direct messages, @ messages, and general updates you send to gage the right mix of content for the Twitter account. You can measure your responsiveness if you’re in an area like customer support or troubleshooting. You could measure the number of thank yous or appreciative tweets if your goal is to instruct or teach. You can measure the number of retweets or mentions if your role is like a publisher and you want to increase the amount of hits that your content gets. Twitter measurements should tie directly to the goals you have for technical communication.

Try It
Experiment with Twitter for a while and see if there’s a match for your technical communication goals. We’d love to hear how it turns out!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Focus on Twitter for Technical Documentation

I was sitting in a coffee shop near work as I often do between sessions when one of the baristas sheepishly approached me. I go in there all the time, so most of them know me by face, if not by name. She said, “Are you Jeff?” I answered in the affirmative and she goes, “There’s someone on the phone for you.”

My first thought was that it must be work calling to tell me that there’s been a schedule change. AT&T has spectacularly terrible coverage and this cafe could be a dead zone. One look at my phone confirmed that I was five-bars strong and I had no missed calls. She looked as quizzical as I felt. I took the cordless phone from her and the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello?

Stranger: Is this Jeff?

The voice sounded hesitant and I definitely did not recognize it. I was slightly discombobulated that someone was calling me at this location, but curious and attentive.

Me: Yeah, who is this?

Stranger: This is your neighbor. Did you just check in on Foursquare?

Now before I go any further, let me just explain what Foursquare is in case you don’t know. It’s a GPS-enabled Web application that allows users to “check in” wherever they have cell phone coverage. It’s an extension of social networking media and really the only point to it seems to be showing other users the lame places you go. Depending on how you have your account set up, the app will post your global position on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or all three. My check-ins typically show up in the latter two.

I once explained Foursquare to someone, her response was: “Why would you want do this?” I thought for a second and said, “Because all my other friends are doing it?” We both laughed, but I realized that I didn’t have a real answer to that question. Why would I want to enable my smart phone as a tracking device? Like so many other of my online activities, there really is no point to it.

So back to the story, already in progress:

Me: Yeah, I did [check into Foursquare] …who is this?

Stranger: My name’s Roy, your neighbor. I just saw four black guys try to break into your apartment.

The first tip-off here, other than the fact that some stranger from is contacting me, is that he’s identifying himself as my neighbor. Like any true city dweller, I don’t know any of my neighbors. Sure, I might have names from lobby mailboxes filed away somewhere in my subconscious, but I’m pretty sure Roy isn’t one of them. I never met a Roy in my life.

Me: Uh, who is this?

The incredulity was rising in my voice and I kept expecting at any minute “Roy” would identify himself as someone I knew and that this was all a prank.

Stranger: I’m just a concerned citizen.

It was more than evident something wasn’t right here. Who the hell says things like “concerned citizen” outside of an episode of Dragnet? The hesitation in his voice seemed to grow with every question I asked and there was a faint, subtle bit of reverb, as if the conversation was being recorded.

Me: Okay, who is this?

Stranger: Aren’t you worried about the break-in?

Me: If you’re my neighbor, then where do I live?

There was a pause, more stuttering and finally he says something like:

Stranger: Let me look, I’m sure you were stupid enough to check in there too.

Me: Actually, I never check in with my real home address. Man, you sure are going through a lot of effort to be a dick.

And then he hung up. So much for being a “concerned citizen”.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “Roy” wasn’t who he claimed to be. If he thought he was being a clever thief, he failed completely. A smarter criminal would have done more research and better rehearsed his spiel.

Immediately after he hung up, I recalled a Twitter exchange I had not too long ago with a user calling himself @pleaserobme. This Twitter account (which has since been suspended “due to strange activity”) was connected to a Web site of the same name.

The folks at Please Rob Me (PRM) claim to be privacy advocates, saying that their goal is to raise awareness on the dangers associated with using sites like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite. By telling everyone on the World Wild Web where you are, you’re also telling them where you’re not — namely, home. You might think that PRM is well-intentioned in its quest to keep people safe, but the means by which they do it are highly questionable.

Before Twitter disabled their account, PRM would re-tweet Foursquare check-ins, seemingly at random. The tweets would look something like this:

@pleaserobme: @KirstieAlley just checked in at Krispy Kreme, 1111 Wilshire Blvd, Hollywood, CA.

With the Twitter account gone, they now have a live feed of Foursquare user tweets streaming directly on their homepage. It’s a smorgasbord for the would-be criminals PRM claims it wants to protect you from. In fact, they have a disclaimer which says “our intention is not, and never has been, to have people burgled”. But they sure have a funny way of showing it.

Their tactics aren’t the way to prevent victimization, but quite the opposite. It’s like causing a car collision to prove a point about auto safety or running a third-party candidacy for President. These all have unintentionally calamitous outcomes causing harm rather than good. I’m not really sure what the true motivations of PRM are, but whatever it is, it stinks.

Be that as it may, and I’m loathe to admit this, I think they may have driven their point home with me. I have no way of proving that “Roy The Concerned Citizen” is affiliated with PRM, but he was an effective messenger. This whole has actually made me re-think using these kinds of applications. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to let the entire world know where I am at any given second. Other than it being used as an alibi in a criminal trial, I can’t see much real advantage to being a walking GPS unit.

Before my interaction with “Roy”, I think I had a healthy amount of cautious paranoia. I have an unlisted telephone number, I don’t make my home address available online or in print. I thought I was as private as the next guy. But the truth is, I don’t usually shred all my papers before throwing them away. The only secrets someone rooting through my trash is likely to discover is that I eat way too many Hot Pockets.

I refuse to let this situation turn me into some black helicopter-fearing, tin foil hat-wearing, irrational kook who thinks everyone is out to steal his stuff or identity. Honestly, I don’t really have much stuff worth stealing. And as far as my identity goes, I think I’d actually feel sorry for someone trying to use my Social Security Number. I doubt they’ve have any more luck with it than I have.

Like I said, I think there was something more than a poorly planned caper going on with “Roy”. There was definitely some recording taking place and I suspect I was not the first person to get a phone call like this. I wonder how many people actually fell for this bit. How many overly excitable victims, in a moment of panic, blurted out their home address to a stranger on the telephone? I suspect these are the same sorts of people who get caught up in those Nigerian email scams.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, recently remarked that “the age of privacy is over”. It’s an infuriating statement but it’s essentially true. In all fairness, privacy is a two-way street. No one made us join Facebook or Twitter or anything else. We willingly became the coal for these data miners.

For those of us who came of age, technologically speaking, in the Web 2.0 Era, it may be too late to cancel, delete or otherwise redact what’s out there. Basically we have to deal with cards we’ve dealt ourselves. One could argue that if you choose to live your life in public you don’t get to control what other people do with this public information. You can, however, choose how much of it to put out there.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Private Eyes Are Watching You: Twitter Oversharing and Its Bizarre Real-World Consequences

As the number of people you follow grows, the number of junk tweets that you get in your Friends Timeline grows as much or even faster. So after a time, you end up with never ending stream of some tweets most of which are not even close to what you actually hoped to read. The situation gets worse when the people you follow are your friends and you don’t want to offend them by clicking the ‘Unfollow’ button.

The client software currently available for incorporating Twitter on your desktop (such as TweetDeck) is much better at dealing with the noise problem than the conventional web interface. Some of them feature multiple columns for different stream sources, other allow some limited filtering, but no complex solution has been available for a long time. The recently released Mixero Twitter client has come with a number of tools specially crafted to serve those who want to get rid of the noise and information overload once and for ever.

The major new concept used in Mixero is a concept of an ActiveList. ActiveList allows you to choose a number of sources that are really important for you at the time. Tweets from these are sources form a so-called ActiveList Timeline. The sources may be a particular user, a group of users, or a channel.

Keyword filters can be applied to each individual source. So for example, If I want to read all tweets from @problogger, then all tweets from the group of my friends that talk about ‘girls’ keyword, and also monitor what’s happening around Apple’s iPad, I can easily set up it in my ActiveList: I add @problogger, then add Friends group and apply a keyword filter (‘girls’) to it, then I add a channel with the keyword ‘iPad’ and I’m done. Now I will only get the tweets that I really want to get. Furthermore, I can save my ActiveList and come back to it later. They are interchanged in one click. The saved ActiveLists are called the Contexts. Contexts are synchronized via Mixero server across all instances of Mixero across all platforms, so I can easily create one at home on PC and then continue using it at work on my Mac.

And If I’m at work, when I don’t have much time to read the tweets, I can switch Mixero to the so-called Avatars Mode when Mixero hides itself only leaving the ActiveList avatars visible with balloons showing events like tweets or DMs from them.

Mixero is really a step forward in reducing the noise in Twitter streams. With it’s innovative approach and proper development, it will make the life of active Twitter users much easier by providing a number of useful tools to manage incoming tweets and fish out important information avoiding the overload problem.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Use Mixero to Reduce Twitter Noise