Here are 5 suggestions for Twitter’s “Who To Follow” feature, that I have seen being mentioned in the Twitterverse:
These simple things will improve the effectiveness of Twitter’s suggestions greatly.
Twitter is rolling out a new feature to help you discover new people to follow:
The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.
This is a very welcome move by Twitter. TechCrunch says they’re building a Social Graph, while VentureBeat suggests a PeopleRank algorithm powering these suggestions.
The problem? Twitter badly needs a Matt Cutts.
Here are stats on number of tweets by Twitter Users by RJMetrics from Jan 2010:
That means only 20% are active users.
The 2009 Annual Report from Barracuda Labs independently confirms these findings.
Now, from the remaining 20% of “active Twitter users”, how many users are spam?
According to TwitSweeper in March 2010: 5%.
These are accounts who tweet "make money fast online!", "multiple sources of passive income", "view my naked pics!", etc.
That leaves 15% of Twitter users who are real and may be considered worth following.
If Twitter is trying to build a meaningful, relevant social graph, they have to clean up first.
Twitter’s PeopleRank faces the same challenge as Google’s PageRank: Blackhat SEO. These spam accounts are followed by each other and by other fake accounts – all to provide a semblance of a active social user graph and avoid algorithmic detection. These are virtually indistinguishable from real users and will become part of the suggested users ecosystem.
How many times do we encounter spam accounts on Facebook? How many times do we see spam results in the first page of Google search results? In contrast, how many times do we get @replies from spammers on Twitter?
A contaminated social graph or PeopleRank system is harmful to Twitter from an investor, user, and advertiser point of view. It will be great if Twitter is able to suggest whom to unfollow and get rid of all these inactive, fake, and spam accounts.
This is a companion post to How I Live and Breathe Google Reader. A few people have asked for some of my stats, so I am sharing them too.
Different people use Twitter for different purposes. My objectives are:
I use @ScepticGeek as my professional account for my key goals, and @Palsule as a personal account for the last. The remainder of this post focuses on my @ScepticGeek account.
I think defining your objective behind using any network or service is important as it helps define the kind of social graph and relationships you build using it.
I share tech news and opinion pieces about current tech trends. I try my best to keep my Twitter feed a relevant signal. I don’t tweet all of my friends’ blog posts just because they’re my friends.
I realize this may be construed as anti-social behavior among social media experts, but as I explained in Role of Curation in the Attention Economy, I don’t wish to increase noise for my followers and am more interested in curating my Twitter feed to keep it relevant for my followers.
My objectives drive my follow policy. I typically follow people who break tech news. I also follow people who may not break news themselves, but who constantly live in the breaking tech news world and are always sharing fresh stuff.
The key principle behind my Follow Policy is Relevance. Thus, I do not follow all experts and people I admire. A person’s greatness isn’t always proportional to the relevance of their Twitter feed to my objectives.
Because I follow relatively few people, some folks assume that I only follow “big shots”. That simply isn’t true. Sometimes, I also follow people who @Reply me with interesting comments on what I share.
I am constantly following new people and unfollowing some of them. This is a continuous process and I am brutal in curating my following list. Sometimes, I use the following benchmarks in deciding whether to unfollow someone:
Lastly, I don’t care if the people I choose to follow, follow me back or not.
To me, a Follow is more than a social gesture. A Follow means that I try my best to read tweets, read the articles being shared, listen, answer questions when I can, offer help where possible.
A great many people complain that Twitter is not suitable for having conversations.
On the other hand, a great many people I admire and respect, from top tech bloggers and editors of leading tech blogs, to VCs and media/journalism experts, unaware of this inherent limitation of Twitter, continue to use it for meaningful conversations. So do I.
I make an effort to respond to each and every @Reply, as long as it is being made in good spirit and doesn’t reek of fanboyism.
I try to attribute my sources as far as possible, as I described earlier in Thanksgiving via Attribution.
From Google Buzz + Reader + Twitter + Facebook = Noise: “When you auto-share, you’re not a human on that network, you turn into a bot. Bots are what we call spam.”
I neither use any tool that automates tweets, nor do I typically follow those who do.
I try to make each tweet meaningful for my followers. My usual format is:
“Original Post Title” <Link> by “Author/Blog” /via @source /my comments if any
Frequently, the original blog title is either too sensationalistic or entirely misleading or link-baiting. In such cases, I dispense with the original title entirely substituting it with my own.
I use Bit.ly as my preferred URL shortener. Here are my Bit.ly stats for the past month:
My monthly stats typically range between 500 to 3000.
Though Twitter mostly works in real-time and I live in India, it is interesting that my followers are primarily based in the United States and EU.
For those who’re interested, my Klout Score varies from 58 to 62.
According to Klout, I am a “Thought Leader”:
I usually avoid ending my blog posts with the customary “You can follow me on xyz here” plea, but I will make an exception for this post. So if you’re interested in tech news, do follow @ScepticGeek on Twitter! 
On the first day of the Chirp developer conference, Twitter announced “Annotations”:
The feature will allow developers to “add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the system.” So, just like a tweet can today be transmitted along with information about which other tweet it was in reply to, or what location it came from, or what application it was created on, now Twitter will allow developers to make up new stuff. Twitter is looking to see how developers use Annotations before it creates any sort of taxonomy for them, Sarver said.
What can such metadata include? Apart from the obvious ones, let us consider possibilities:
Using these, apps can come up with interesting filters that increase relevance for my Twitter experience:
As apparent from some examples from the top-of-my-head, there are lots of creative possibilities.
Annotations will be app-specific. Annotations devised by Tweetdeck will be incomprehensible to Seesmic and vice-versa. There is potential for vast fragmentation here, in the absence of a uniform taxonomy defined by Twitter.
I expect Twitter will wait to see what developers come up with and then absorb the best innovations in its native implementations. In the meantime, Annotations will increase “stickiness” of specific Twitter apps and may be used to lock-in users to certain apps.
Is this a good move on the part of Twitter? I don’t know. But in the absence of guidance from Twitter, this is a free-for-all that will hinder seamless interoperability between different Twitter clients, which may not be good for the ecosystem as a whole.
This post is a collection of small observations that may not be individually “post-worthy”.
We all know that @Replies to you are visible only in the home timeline of those following both you and the sender. Thus you will not see the following tweet unless you were following both @ScepticGeek and @LayeredByte:
Now, if I do an old style ReTweet by prefixing it with RT as below, my ReTweet is visible to everyone who follows me, even if they don’t follow @LayeredByte.
But what if I do a new style ReTweet? A new style ReTweet will not prefix anything, and is effectively the same as an @Reply. The question in my mind was:
Are new style ReTweets of @Replies visible to everyone who follows you (and not only to those following both)?
Some quick searching on Google did not yield an answer. Twitter’s help on @Replies and ReTweets does not clarify this, nor does Evan William’s post explaining organic RTs. So with the help of my colleague @MadLid, I performed a quick test.
I retweeted her @Reply to me from my @ScepticGeek account, and checked if the new style ReTweet appeared in my @Palsule account from which I was not following her:
Voilà! Even if @Palsule is not following @MadLid, her @Reply to @ScepticGeek appeared in @Palsule’s home timeline when @ScepticGeek did a new style ReTweet of her @Reply.
If you’re wondering “what’s the big deal?”, there is none. This is what geeks like me who like to experiment and pay attention to detail do. I did not find it documented anywhere, hence doing it here.
Note that this is how RTs should work, and Twitter has implemented them in the correct way. When you ReTweet, you want all your followers to see it, irrespective of whether they’re following the original tweeter or not. Thus, in a way, I am also applauding Twitter’s developers for bypassing the @Reply visibility restriction when they implemented organic RTs.
I also find it amazing that people are already using what is actually a “feature”, without realizing it.
Last week, Twitter started rolling out localized trends. On November 9th last year, Twitter announced its Trends API. Here is what I had tweeted hours before that happened, while it was still November 8th in the US:
Just a note that I have added a disclosure policy on the blog.
At the start of this year, Seesmic bought Ping.fm enabling status updates across 50 social networks. Mark Hopkins elaborated on why this is a threat to Twitter.
Scobleizer talks about Twitter’s declining traffic and offers suggestions for improvement, which people commenting on the post say would turn Twitter into FriendFeed/Facebook.
Seesmic’s Ping.fm acquisition had led me to wonder if that makes it a perfect candidate for a Twitter acquisition. Marshall Kirkpatrick seemed to agree.
Would it make sense for Twitter to acquire Seesmic and Ping.fm?
Does Twitter want to build its own social network and fight against Facebook? Contrary to what you might think, Evan Williams says Twitter is not a social network.
Twitter’s strategy is to be the “Pulse of the Planet”. What better way to become that pulse than be the conduit that people use across 50 social networks? This would bolster Jack Dorsey’s vision of Twitter’s success as Twitter becoming infrastructure.
When the goal of a service is to become the nervous system of the real-time web, the traffic to its website doesn’t matter. The pulse of the online world lies in status updates people make on various social networks. I am sure that Seesmic, with Ping.fm’s half a million users, looks a very attractive option for Twitter to grab that pulse.
The scenario can look gloomy for the open web, with the social graph of users in the hands of Facebook, and real-time pulse in the hands of Twitter.
Since the introduction of Lists in Twitter, there has been some speculation about how Twitter Lists could help indicate Influence. See the following for some background:
It is clear that interest focuses on the ratio of your Lists to Followers.
I decided to assess whether this new metric correlates in any way to existing influence measurement tools. The objective was to assess whether the metric has any correlation with influence ranking algorithms that do not use Lists information. For my experiment, I considered influence measurement tools like Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and Klout.
Not for casual users. There can be important implications for serious users. Since the advent of Twitter, the number of followers has been considered to be a rough indicator of influence. As a result, very few have taken pains to actually filter their followers and weed out spammers and bots. In 12 Tips to Enhance Your Twitter Reputation, I had discussed how you should do this. If the Lists-Follower metric is widely used for influence measurement, you will see people actually scanning their Followers.
This can also become important because your influence may determine the ranking of your tweets in search results.
My tool of choice was Klout, for the following reasons:
I used 40 Twitter users I follow for creating my dataset. I only considered accounts that represented people, and not brands. For my dataset, I selected:
The result of my experiment looks like this, with the accounts ordered by decreasing no. of followers:
I have two Twitter accounts – @SocialGeek, which I use for tech stuff, and @Palsule, which is personal and everything non-tech.
I have been using Seesmic Desktop since Seesmic Web doesn’t support multiple Twitter accounts yet. I am not a Facebook fan so don’t need Facebook support in my Twitter client. I used Tweetdeck initially because of the following features:Tweetdeck was very slow, so I switched to Seesmic Desktop. It was lighter and faster, but didn’t support Group Sync.
Now, I’m using HootSuite in a dedicated full-screen Chrome window. It supports all the above key features and:Now, I’m waiting for Seesmic Web version to support multiple Twitter Accounts.
See and download the full gallery on posterous
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After months of sitting on my computer on a backless settee, I began to realize that my back has a spinal cord, and that it's made up of individual vertebrae.
But that's not what this is about. While my new chair does indeed improve my posture, this is a new posturing using Posterous.com. I am writing this email using Gmail, sending it to post@posterous.com and attaching the photo of my new chair. After I hit the send button, I sit back in my chair. I expect Posterous will:Just 1 Email. Now, let's see how it works!
