‘Twitter’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: It is finally here. Twitter spam. (It has probably been around for a while but now it is here for me personally.)  Now that Twitter is a mainstream form of communication it has been hijacked by scammers, spammers and other idiot marketers. Over the past few days my followers have been mainly from  make money fast and other fake accounts that are trying to get my attention. As always, the spam works on the ability to send large numbers of messages for little or no cost. It relies on the few people who click it and make it worthwhile. Spammers also target the…

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Excerpt: I love the Gadget Show with its reviews of the latest gadgets and gizmos. Yesterday’s show treated us to a bit of social media experimentation in which Facebook was pitted against Twitter in an attempt to organise a ‘dance-off’ at Somerset House in London. The rules of the experiment were rather limiting, in that they had less than a week to organise and publicise the event and they were only allowed to use one social media site. Gail Porter, started by using Facebook to contact her seven hundred odd friends about the event and further publicised the event by adding an event…

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Excerpt: I was reading an article by Tom Critchlow on  why we shouldn’t use tiny urls in newspapers. All good stuff, but this got me thinking about how the tinyURL system works? TinyURLs are useful when referring people to sites on Twitter. Clearly we require a mapping which takes a URL and maps it to a unique but shorter URL. Hash tables do this; there is an input and a method of encoding which generates the tinyURL. What could be used? MD5 produces a code that is 32 characters still too long and a usability minefield. Other MD codings are available and MD2…

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Excerpt: I have just been listening to Tom Scott’s erudite and funny presentation (it had flashes of  Dave Goreman for me), on how he developed a Twitter tool called Tweleted. It exploits the different way that messages are deleted from using the application interface but not deleted from its search engine, Twitter search. A comparison between the two sets of results, removing the one are in both sets leaves only the deleted messages. Tweleted in Good and Evil modes The nefarious purposes of this would be great for anyone silly enough to say something out of turn and then delete it but these…

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Excerpt: A metric is used to measure something. In SEO we want to measure the effect of the changes we are making to the website to know we are doing the right things. Ranking used to be seen as a sign that SEO was working and we would rejoice whenever a key-phrase would reach that page one, position one ranking. With the advent of personal search, ranking becomes less reliable as a factor of success. However, there are many other metrics that can be applied. Business Metrics Business metrics are by far the most important measures of success. The reason you are paying…