New RTs with @Replies and Localized Trending Topics

On January 26, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

This post is a collection of small observations that may not be individually “post-worthy”.

New Style ReTweets with @Replies

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:

ReplyTweet Example

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.

Old ReTweet Example

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:

New Style Retweet Reply

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.

Localized Trending Topics

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:

Localized Trending Topics 

Disclosure Policy

Just a note that I have added a disclosure policy on the blog.

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Is Seesmic With Ping.fm Attractive For A Twitter Acquisition?

On January 12, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

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.

MarshallK Retweet

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.

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Analyzing Twitter Lists-Follower Ratio As An Indicator of Influence

On November 8, 2009, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

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.

Is this a Big Deal?

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.

Influence Ranking Tool

My tool of choice was Klout, for the following reasons:

  • Speed. The tool had to process and rank influence for each member of my sample set quickly.
  • Twitalyzer gave unlikely influence ranks for some people I knew.
  • Klout is transparent in revealing what factors it considers and changes to their algorithm. This will be useful in revisiting this after it incorporates Lists information.
  • Klout Score uses 25-30 variables to be comprehensive, unlike Twitalyzer, which uses only 5.

Sample Selection

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:

  • Those with more than 10,000 followers
  • Those with a ratio of Followers:Friends > 10:1
  • Some more users at random to form a long tail for the analysis, all of whom have more than 1000 followers
  • I couldn’t resist including myself, as one user with <900 followers

The result of my experiment looks like this, with the accounts ordered by decreasing no. of followers:

LF Influence Results

(more…)

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HootSuite Throws Seesmic Desktop Out Of The Ring

On August 5, 2009, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

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:

  • Support Multiple Twitter Accounts
  • Support Groups with ability to sync across browsers and platforms (I dual-boot between WinXP and Win7 and use all browsers since I write tech stuff)
  • Support creating Groups mixed with people I follow from both accounts
  • Create custom Search columns
  • And several others like trends, video, etc. that I didn’t use

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:

  • Takes half the memory – Seesmic with AIR 110K, HootSuite in Chrome 55K (see attached screenshots)
  • Provides stats for those who’re interested
  • And finally, I can get rid of Adobe AIR

Now, I’m waiting for Seesmic Web version to support multiple Twitter Accounts.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via from SkepticGeek’s Posterous

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Posturing From My New Chair

On August 2, 2009, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

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:

  • Post this email and the photo to my Posterous blog http://socialgeek.posterous.com
  • Post my photo to my Flickr photo stream
  • Post my photo to my Picasa web albums
  • Post this update to my Facebook account (I want to see how it does that, whether it just links, or uploads the photo, etc.)
  • Post this email and photo to my Wordpress.com blog – An Unquiet Mind
  • Post this update to my Friendfeed, which will then tweet an update on Twitter as @SocialGeek
  • Post this update as a tweet on Twitter as @Palsule

Just 1 Email. Now, let's see how it works!

Posted via email from SocialGeek

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