May 17th, 2010 at 5:14AM

I Should Have Started Twitter…

In a random quest to determine when I joined Facebook, I came across an email I sent to suggest@facebook.com back in September of 2005:

The trend right now with computer savvy people is blogging, and I don’t  necessarily think that facebook should become a blog.  But maybe a part of one’s profile could be something like a short blog entry.  There’s just no good place for people to say something like I’m studying abroad or I’m traveling Europe.  Maybe it could show just the most recent entry and then you can view all the old ones too…Just a thought

Chris

If only I had thought to take that idea and turn it into something I would’t be unemployed right now… Just don’t blame me for all of Facebook’s privacy issues… I swear I never sent that as a suggestion.

2 notes #twitter#facebook
January 11th, 2009 at 4:40AM

To Auto-Follow or Not: Managing Your Twitter Stream

Twitter Bird
Just like most of the people reading this post, I use Twitter quite a bit (@hutchins). In the last few weeks I’ve noticed that the number of followers I have on Twitter has starting to pick up quite a bit (see why here). Anyways, it has left me in the middle of a major Twitter decision: does one follow everyone that follows them (auto-follow) or not.

As I often do with most decisions I looked at the pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s:


  • It’s polite (I kinda feel like a bad person when I don’t return a strangers follow)

  • Won’t miss DM’s

  • Expand your network

  • More tweets in your Twitter stream = more chances to learn something new / interesting


Con’s

  • Irrelevant tweets in your Twitter stream

  • Makes it difficult to stay on top of your closest friends’ tweets

  • Opens the door to twitter / DM spam (especially annoying if you get SMS notifications for DMs)

  • According to twitterratio.com, it would give me a friend-to-follower ratio closer to 1.0 and thus make me less “popular”


As for now, I’ve adopted a policy of checking each user’s tweets before deciding to follow them (for spam and type of content). However, in the long run (once I get more followers / day) it might be more worthwhile to auto-follow than spend the time to check out each user.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

(Twitter graphic courtesy of Smashing Magazine)

1 note #twitter#auto-follow#Technology
January 8th, 2009 at 6:33AM

Random Twitter Phenomena

Over the past weeks I’ve noticed a few Twitter “Phenomenona” that I felt were worth sharing:


  1. After Kevin Rose said “ask me any question, and I will @ reply you back (for the next 20 mins, then getting dinner)”, over 1,200 people @replied him within those 20 minutes. I was sitting on the couch with @brianshaler and we were both amazed that so many people were so closely watching Rose’s Tweets AND had a question for him.

  2. Chris Pirillo managed to create value out of being helpful on Twitter. He frequently posted links to coupons / product deals on different e-commerce sites. What you may or may not have noticed was that each link was an affiliate link that surely earned him a small kickback on any purchases made on that site

  3. After being @referenced in tweets from a few friends (@andrewhyde, @brianshaler, @t and @indiekid to name a few) who happen to have quite a few more followers than I do, people started following me at much higher than usual rates. While this seems so obvious, watching it happen really solidified my understanding of how Twitter “works”.

#twitter#Technology