A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
How do you get 14,000 followers on Twitter in one day? Be the Dalai Lama! You can follow His Holiness at @OHHDL and of course visit the Dalai Lama website. And, on a lesser note, you can follow me on Twitter @djuggler.
Update: The title should have actually been How to go from 0 to 14,000 to 0 followers on Twitter in one day considering @OHHDL was an impostor. See Willfull’s comment..
I know I signed up for Twitter shortly after it emerged at SXSW in March of 2007. I did not start using it until months later. So far the oldest Tweet I can find is from November 8, 2007 courtesy of TweetScan:
My day would go better if I couldn’t count the seconds between clicking and having my co mputer respond. 6:24 AM Nov 8th, 2007 from web
Twitter only let’s me go back in my profile to 5:28 PM Apr 10th, 2008. A day ago I was able to browse back to 11:57 AM Apr 10th, 2008. I suspect that Twitter limits you to going back 160 pages in your profile (ie. history) so those who Tweet less, can see further back in time. I suspect this is why some people on Twitterholic who Twitter more infrequently appear to have been on the system longer than those who Twitter frequently.
Ah! Barry of Inn of the Last Home references in a lasthome tweet @djuggler from 11:45 AM Jul 23rd, 2007.
Tommy following lead from other manager and making a second attempt. He bumped into an old friend. 11:45 AM Jul 23rd, 2007 from txt
I wonder if there’s a future in Twitter Archeology or Twitter Detective work. I personally believe everyone’s first Tweet is something like "Trying this out. Not sure I’ll use it."
Update: Twitter Tip- Favorite your first Tweet to make it easier to find in the future.
Update November 20, 2009: According to How long have you been tweeting, my first Tweet was on March 16, 2007. Feels like it should be longer than that.
We have social rules in society. For instance, we don’t sneeze into our hand then immediately shake someone else’s hand. Some people have difficulty understanding social rules in real life. To further complicate these social rules, they vary from culture to culture. Now, introduce the Internet and it’s latest craze, social media. To be in, hip, popular, and just not ignored on the Internet right now, you must be "social." For businesses, this means engaging your customers.
A great example is Comcast’s Frank Eliason and his use of Twitter. Frank created the Twitter account @ComcastCares and started using keyword searches with tools like Summize to find customer’s complaining about Comcast’s service and he tackled these problems directly, one on one. Rather than the customer reaching out to Comcast, Frank reached out to the customer and redefined customer service on the Internet. Now many companies use Twitter and blog searches to engage customers, retain customers, and repair their corporate image.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh took the Zappos core value #6 "Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication" to an extreme by encouraging staff to embrace Twitter and blogging. Tony tweets as @zappos and blogs under the Zappos CEO and COO Blog. Even though he is a busy CEO, he takes time to respond to people like me. That’s engagement!
So what of social rules online? Just read comments at a major media outlet such as Knoxnews.com and see how the power of apparent anonymity can turn the uninitiated Internet neophyte, what I would assume is a normally decent human being, into a royal ass. I see horrible comments in such forums that I cannot imagine a person having the audacity to utter in mixed company in person. Twitter is undeniably one of the best examples of social media on the Internet. In 140 characters, you share with your followers (and the world if your Tweets are not set to private) the mundane in your life, the news, announcements, or whatever suits your mood. Seems simple enough, but there are unwritten, social rules which have formed around the service. Genuine Jeremy Floyd polled his followers and published Rules of the Road-Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Twitterverse. If you feel his list needs expanding, head over to his blog and add your social rules in his comments. You can also send him a message through Twitter @jfloyd.
If you didn’t know, Santa is all ago! I know, because he has personally Tweeted me. That’s right, you can find Santa Claus on Twitter! @SantaClaus is sending updates as he progresses around the world. @SantaClaus25 is discussing his Christmas Eve progress and sending direct messages to other Twitters. @Santa is reporting his locations and posting videos. It looks like The Polar Express Conductor may have retired for the season. He was @PlrExpConductor.
Merry Christmas to all! And Tweet well tonight.
Jott is one of my favorite web services. I use speed dial on my phone to call Jott, I speak the name of the person I want to send a note to (usually ‘myself’), I record my message spelling out difficult words "My name is McCaughan M-c-c-a-u-g-h-a-n", then I speak the date and time for when I want a text transcription of my words sent to my email and phone as sms. Jott’s magic is not in its speech to text software but in its human backup. Computers do the bulk of the work but humans (India I think) listen to difficult messages and provide a fairly accurate transcription although sometimes there are errors. My first reminder today:
Get a plunger.
Okay. I am pretty sure I never said to get a plunger. I can go to the Jott website and listen to my original message to figure out what I really meant. I also like to have fun with the messages sometimes:
Get a plant light, save the plants. Save the plants, save the world.
You can also use Jott to post to Twitter, Remember the Milk, and 40 some odd other services.
At the beginning of this week, we learned that Pownce is shutting down. Pownce in many regards was superior to Twitter but never claimed the community that Twitter built which gives Twitter its power and the ability to turn down $500million in stock (see also the NYT) offered by Facebook.
At the end of this week, we learn that I Want Sandy is shutting down. I Want Sandy was a convenient reminder service not terribly dissimilar to Jott. Interestingly enough, the intellectual property has been purchased by…wait for it…Twitter!
While the company [Values of n] and services will be shutting down, Stikkit and Sandy‘s DNA will live on; the intellectual property behind both has been acquired by Twitter, Inc [http://twitter.com]. While Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product, those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience. [Source, Get Satisfaction – I Want Sandy, A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)]
That same announcement explains that the owner Rael Dornfest took an engineering job with Twitter. It Died notes this and has further commentary.
Dornfest wasn’t charging for these services, but they were quite good at their purposes. He opted to take a job with Twitter, sell them his intellectual property, and shutter the site. [Source, ItDied.com, In Defense of Shutdowns]
Until December 19, 2008, you can export your data from Sandy.
Sandy, R.I.P.
I’m banging out code today and making good headway. In the meantime, everything I have sent to the cloud seems to be going to /dev/null. Guy Kawaski has answered everyone’s Tweets but mine. Twitter posts usually see lots of traffic but not this one. My technical questions on IRC have gone unanswered. I feel a bit in a vacuum today. Are my tubes clogged?!
Twitter’s API (basically a way to let software developer’s work with Twitter’s data) has been a huge factor in Twitter’s success. When Twitter did not provide adequate search, a developer used the API to create http://summize.com/ which was so good that Twitter purchased it and incorporated the code as http://search.twitter.com/. Twitter does not provide stats but numerous developers have created applications such as Twitter Charts and Twitter Stats to provide statistics. (See also: Now You Can Graph Your Twitter Usage) The API has allowed people to get away from the phone and web interfaces by developing desktop applications such as Twhirl and TweetDeck (which includes features not built into Twitter such as grouping of friends). Twitter by default emails you when someone starts following but never tells you when someone quits following so software developers used the API to write Qwitter and Twitterless.
Where’s the flaw? The flaw is in the authentication. Many of these services or applications developed by a third party require you enter your username and password. There is nothing to say that this third party should be trusted and we give them the keys to the kingdom. With that username and password that developer could maliciously use your account for spam, sign you up for other services, or flat out lock you out of your own Twitter account. If one of these services started sending too many Tweets and causing your followers to quit following (see #7) you, the solution is to change your password. But, changing your password also breaks all the other Twitter services you have signed up to use.
What’s the solution? The solution is simple. For each service or application that requires a username and password to access my Twitter data, I should be able to generate a key instead of giving them my password similarly to the way Amazon Web Services
Until Twitter implements a key scheme, I am no longer giving my password out to third party Twitter applications and services (unless they are really cool and look really trustable!). I made an exception today for TwitterFone so I could compare it to Jott.
See also:
Twitter Guide: How To Do Things With Twitter
Update Dec 15, 2008: See also Is Twitterank Ranking Your Popularity Or Stealing Your Password? Others see the same flaw I do.
Update: OAuth looks like a very viable solution.
Update Dec 29, 2008: Alex Payne, The Twitter API Lead developer, confirms that Twitter is testing OAuth! Yes! OAuth is coming.
Update Jan 2, 2009: See also Allen Stern’s Sheep Line Up in Perfect Twitter Formation and Louis Gray’s Twitterank Can Have My Password, No Questions Asked.
Update Jan 3, 2009: I’ve now officially been phished through Twitter. I didn’t bite. I’m betting someone used a 3rd party website that looked legitimate while collecting usernames and passwords (maybe it promised to send @ replies through email or give Twitter stats or something) and then using the Twitter API ran a muck sending direct messages from "trusted" people hoping to get people to click through to the bad website. The one I received:
softclothing Hey, i found a website with your pic on it… LOL check it out here http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login
Pownce RIP Jun 27 2007-Dec 15 2008 (open to pub Jan 22 2008) N’vr used it much but liked its format and function see: Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart
With only one year of useful life in the application, it was purchased by SixApart for "an undisclosed amount" which to me sounds like it made money for Rose and others.
I’ve just been on the phone with Sprint because one of their customers has left a pseudo-threatening/hateful comment on my wife’s blog. They advised immediately filing a police report so that their corporate security department could escalate the issue faster than if I handle it myself. I really don’t like giving hateful people this much attention. It’s best if they just go away. People, the Internet is far from anonymous! In cases like this, you don’t leave a bread crumb trail; you leave a paved boulevard.
My workstation is having trouble. I suspect a piece of hardware is dying or a huge dust bunny is wrecking havoc inside the case. It spontaneously reboots a few times a day which is not really a problem because I wouldn’t take breaks otherwise and Firefox always comes back in the same state as before the crash…well, almost always. I don’t help myself because of the way I use the computer. I have many apps open at once and typically will have multiple Firefox windows open with 10 to 20 tabs open in each one. This is how I do research and it is typically work related or blog related. In today’s instance I had 4 windows open. 3 were work related and 1 was filled with information I might one day blog about. These are usually just bookmarked at Delicious for that day I finally get a round to it. Considering my machine was having trouble and I had far too many tabs open, I was just starting to bookmark everything and reduce my windows down to the very few I needed when the computer crashed hard. Upon coming back up, Firefox opened to just a single blank window…no tabs. I needed that work related research! I can reproduce it but this is just frustrating!
So, is there a way to tell Firefox, "restore the previous, previous state?" I think I’m faced with scrolling through the mornings history and pulling up pages one at a time.
Best Tweet o’ the Day:
oldsillybear Good: Merle Haggard recovering at home from surgery. Bad: he had cancer surgery. Ugly: I didn’t know he was still alive. 10 minutes ago from web
Follow Knoxville’s pulse on the election returns as Knoxnews shows the most recent Tweets hash tagged with #knoxelect because you can rely on Twitter for breaking news.
Warchalking for Halloween: The Halloween Candy Code. via Critter.
