Twitter – Page 4 – Stay N Alive

Category: Twitter

Twitter, Two Years Later and Nothing Has Changed

Posted on by jessestay

Last year, exactly 1 year yesterday in fact, I wrote an article reminding developers, while venting that we were in a constant state of being at Twitter’s mercy.  In the last year, Twitter has actually improved a lot in regards to stability – they attribute that to Unicorns.  I think it’s because they’ve hired a lot of good people over the last year.  Yet, the core problems of 2 years ago still exist, and you know what – I’m fine with it now.

http://qik.com/swfs/qikPlayer5.swf

Check out the interview (again) that Robert Scoble and I (mostly Robert) did with Ev Williams and Biz Stone almost exactly 2 years ago.  This was in response to Alex Payne writing a blog post calling Robert a “whale” and blaming Twitter’s scaling difficulties on that.  At the time I was also very concerned about the developer ecosystem, and that has not changed since.  Robert Scoble since has been replaced by pop-culture icons on Twitter’s suggested user list, and, as one of Twitter’s top promoters and even the top user for quite awhile, he was thrown under the rug by Twitter as well.

Here’s the thing though – as I said in my article yesterday, I have no problem with this.  Twitter is a business.  They have a core technology they need to build, and they’re going to continue building that to compete.  They even had auto follow for awhile – I competed, we provided a better service (and probably even had more users than Twitter using it), and Twitter eventually didn’t see the need to continue supporting it.  They’ve since replaced several other features my business offers.  We’ve continued to compete there as well.  They even asked me to remove specific features because it was not in their core interest.

At first I was dumbfounded at how I was being treated by Twitter.  I even left the service for a short while due to my disappointment.  Then I think I went into denial.  I’d continue making the same mistakes over and over, continuing to release features only to see Twitter replace them.  For some reason after each time I’d still get mad, complain, and the cycle would continue.  It wasn’t until this year that I’ve finally come to terms with all of this.  Yes, I have a service that relies on Twitter.  Yes, I have many features that risk getting replaced by Twitter.  No, I probably will never be acquired by Twitter, nor will any of my competitors.

I’m okay with that though.  I’ve provided some great services to many people and people actually pay for this stuff and like it.  We still provide the best stats of new and lost followers on Twitter.  We have some of the best filters on the planet for Twitter.  We have one of the best auto follow tools on the planet and have upheld our responsibility to keep Twitter clean in the process of doing that.  We’ll continue to improve these features and add new features in the future.  I started it – I can’t just quit until it’s all over and either someone acquires me, or Twitter completely puts me out of business.  I’ve come to complete terms with that, while at the same time I realize I need to come up with a core and move towards that as a focus.

I’ve been saying this over and over again on this blog over the past 2 years.  Twitter isn’t going to change their ways.  They’ll continue to compete.  They’ll continue to add features.  They’ll even buy one of your (or my) competitors.  That’s life.  And I’m okay with that.  I’ve been through this too many times to get mad any more.

One year from now I’m sure I’ll say the exact same thing I said this year, last, and the year before.  Twitter won’t change.  They’re a business, and they have to compete to stay alive.  It’s time we all start innovating, and let Twitter be Twitter.  The complaining, quite honestly, is getting old (I think I invented it).

It’s funny how Twitter gives us this reminder almost the exact same time every year, yet we all seem to think it’s news when it comes around.

What is Your Core?

Posted on by jessestay

In a typical Lego set, there is a core set of building blocks that make up the core of the object you are building.  My son just got a new Star Wars Tie fighter Lego set.  It relies on a few common objects, such as little flat Legos you might see in other sets, but overall, what you would see in this set would be much different than the core of Legos you would see in, say, a set to build a House, or even my 2 year old’s set of Duplos which builds just very simple objects geared towards people his age.  For a house set you will see more block-like structures.  For a Robot you may see more objects with holes in them, to accommodate for axles and gears.  For a plane you may see more flat structures for things like wings and a skinnier body.  In the end, you’re trying to build one core, unique object that is different than any of the other objects around it.

Too often I think entrepreneurs struggle to find out what their core is.  Social Networks should be ubiquitous.  Real time should be ubiquitous.  Open Standards should be ubiquitous. Search should be ubiquitous.  There are already companies out there that have these things as their core.  They’re the experts.  I think entrepreneurs and developers often get stuck (myself included) in this rut of fixing things the experts are already good at, rather than finding something new and innovative they can take ownership at.

There’s already a T-Shirt out there that says “Twitter destroyed my market segment, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.  Well, the reason that occurs is because developers are building core blocks that are already part of the Twitter core.  They are building something, the cockpit, the engine, the wheels, that were already destined to be replaced in the original scheme of things.  We developers like to see, and fix, the big picture – I know because I’m in the same boat (or ship?).  However, I think we need to be thinking bigger.  We need to be thinking about what our core is, not what’s missing from others’ cores.

When we talk about “filling holes”, I think the best position to be in is where others are filling the holes that you create.  You own the core that includes the missing parts.  The propellers of Twitter should be added to your core to make your airplane fly.  The Jet Engines of Facebook should be added to your core project to push it forward.  The wheels of Google should be added to your core project to get it off the ground.  But in the end, you still own the airplane.  You have control of the core.  All the other “cores” get to contribute back to your core to make it better.  Heck, you can even take pieces of your core and add it into the other existing cores to complement their space too – the power is you still own your space that way.

As you build new creations, think to yourself, am I contributing to others’ cores, or am I building the core that other cores can add their parts to and make better?  No one should be building another “social network” project.  No one should be building another “search engine” project.  The focus should be on the innovative creations we create, and how other “social networks” and “search engines” can make us better.  It should not be the other way around.

This is the “core” success story of the Building Block Web.  How are you letting Twitter or Facebook or Google make your core project better?

Getting Me to Share Your Posts

Posted on by jessestay

One of the things I like to do on my Twitter account is to share interesting articles around the web that I think would be interesting to my readers.  Such articles can be techy, geeky, mainstream, pop-culture, or anything I deem interesting.  Based on your retweets, I think you like it.  I had someone ask me the other day why I wasn’t sharing more of their posts.  It’s actually quite easy – I’d like to share how, and I’m pretty sure you can use this same technique on any other blogger that uses Google Reader.

I have a policy on Google Buzz – it’s the same policy I have on Twitter.  I follow everyone on Buzz who follows me.  The thing is that I think it’s even more powerful on Buzz because, just like Twitter, it gives me an opportunity to discover interesting people I may not have known about before.  For the spam, I have SocialToo for that.  However, with Buzz, for everyone I follow, I also see their Google Reader shares.  That means for every one of you that follows me on Buzz, if your content is interesting, I am very likely to discover your content that you share (that can even be your own blog posts!), and if I like it, that content goes straight to Twitter and Buzz.

So the secret is just to follow me on Buzz!  Yes, I hide many people in my Google Reader, so it’s important you share unique, and interesting posts.  Also, if I know you I’m also more likely to not hide your shares, so get involved in the conversation.  Comment on my shares, retweet my posts, reply to me, comment on my blog.  I read every single comment and try to respond where it makes sense.  As we have more discussions I get to know you better and I’m less likely to hide your content.

I hope that helps.  I don’t think the individual who asked me to share his content more is following me in Buzz.  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t hide his content because I know him and I like his content.  The secret is to follow on Buzz, join the conversation, and I’ll very likely share your interesting shares on Twitter.  I think the same goes with anyone that uses Google Reader.  There’s a great opportunity here – I hope you use it.

You can follow me on Buzz over on my Google Profile.  Can’t wait to start seeing your shares!

Photo courtesy Creative Commons on Flickr.

Twitter Launches Facebook Connect Competitor, @Anywhere

Posted on by jessestay

I’ve long talked about the MVC model of the Building Block web.  Data Repositories like Amazon Simple Storage, Facebook Data Store, Google Data, and others comprise the Model of this new platform.  APIs like the Twitter API, the Facebook server-side APIs, or other REST-type APIs compose the Controllers of this web.  Then you have the View – something pretty much only Facebook and OpenSocial/Google Friend Connect have covered thus far.  The View enables developers to easily integrate and access code from a user’s Client, the web browser.  Today Twitter added their entry to that game, @Anywhere.

@Anywhere strives to provide a solution for a huge weakness in the Twitter API Platform thus far.  It provides an entire Javascript, Client-side platform for developers and website owners to integrate Twitter easily and simply right on top of their website, no server-side code involved.  This is the missing link Twitter has needed to have a truly competitive solution against Facebook’s Connect platform.

Facebook Connect relies on Javascript to provide an immersive experience into the Facebook environment right on top of any website owner’s site.  With a few lines of Javascript, and an HTML-like tag language called XFBML, website owners can pretty much copy and paste pieces of code in place and immediately have access to comments, become a fan boxes, post to their stream, and even more if you know a little Javascript as well.  It’s unclear if Twitter will be releasing an XFBML competitor (I’d love to help Twitter test if this becomes the case – I wrote the book on Facebook’s FBML), but Twitter is clearly going up against Facebook Connect to provide similar type tools, and I think it’s a very smart move.

I mentioned earlier I was excited about the entry of Josh Elman as product manager at Twitter.  I’m unclear if he had anything to do with this, but you can clearly see the Facebook influence in Twitter’s new API.  With not only Josh, but several others from the Facebook team now working at Twitter, you can bet they’ve compared and contrasted how they could obtain some of the millions of Facebook developers out there.  Making it as easy as possible is the smartest way to do this, and Twitter has already signed on several very big players in the Facebook Connect space, Huffington Post and Yahoo, to be launch partners in this effort.

In addition to those, the most significant partner that I think should not be ignored is Amazon.  Amazon, IMO, is the holy grail in Social E-Commerce, and despite not having a Facebook Connect solution, they seem willing to integrate Twitter into their environment.  Why they are choosing Twitter over Facebook is beyond me – maybe they have a Facebook deal in the works as well?

I’m very excited about this new announcement.  Soon, it will be easy for any developer to very seamlessly, in a single, well-understood language (Javascript), integrate Facebook and Twitter all on a single website with little effort.  As a developer, I’m drooling a bit over this.  I can’t wait to start playing with it.

Please Do Twitter a Favor and Join SocialToo

Posted on by jessestay

Today we announced on the SocialToo blog that we’ve enabled our phishing protection for all 60,000+ SocialToo users (and many, many more to come). This project means a lot to me, as it means the more people that use it, the fewer phishing DMs will be received, links won’t be clicked, passwords won’t be shared, and accounts won’t be compromised. The more I can help prevent this from happening, I think the better for the web in general.

In total, SocialToo has blocked near 200,000 total spam DMs sent to our users, and over 25,000 of those were malicious, phishing, and trapped automatically by our filters. 5,000 of those were just since enabling it on all accounts. That’s 25,000 dms that could have been collecting your Twitter credentials, could have compromised your account, and could have spread further by compromising your account. This service is powerful.

The service gets enabled automatically for any user that just logs in with their Twitter credentials at http://socialtoo.com. Of course, I’d love it if you tried our other features, set up some filters, maybe tracked who followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter, but more than anything I want you to help the web in general by eradicating these pesky dms! Each dm we detect gets deleted from your Twitter account, often before you can see it in your favorite Twitter client, doesn’t get sent in our DM e-mails (found on your Filters page), and a message is sent on your behalf to @spam also notifying Twitter of the compromised account.

Please, if you haven’t had reason to join SocialToo yet, now is the time. This is your opportunity to, just by logging in, help make Twitter a cleaner place. Be sure to check out Louis Gray’s experience with this service on his blog – I think he too has had similar experience in seeing the success of having this enabled.

Oh, and stay tuned, other than this and our new design launch, we’ve got some more really big news coming tomorrow that I think you’re going to really like.

Image courtesy http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/specials/2127679/gone-phishing

Twitter Hires 140th "Character", Adds Lucene Committer Michi Busch to its Search Talent

Posted on by jessestay

It’s no secret Twitter has a desire to have a stronger search presence.  With business models that thrive on content publishing and organization, a strong search product is necessary to provide the most revenue down the road.  Just today, while announcing its 140th employee and celebrating to the music of BT, Twitter hired Michael (Michi) Busch, search indexing expert and committer to the Open Source Lucene search project to its team as a “Search Engineer”, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Busch brings with him not only strong experience in his contributions to Lucene, but also a firm background at IBM working on IBM’s eDiscovery Analyzer product, focusing on indexing and search technologies there as well.  Busch is a regular presenter at various ApacheCon conferences, so I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of him while working for Twitter.

Just after Twitter’s announcement today of its focus on Open Source standards, the hiring of Busch just solidifies that there will continue to be a focus on open technologies at Twitter.  Lucene, perhaps one of the most widely used open source search indexing products in the world, we can now wonder if it will play a part in that process.  With one of its committers working for Twitter, we can hopefully expect real-world cases of search indexing technology integrated into the open source product in the future.

Twitter continues to expand its team of smart talent, and it seems almost weekly continues to add to its pool of geniuses from the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and IBM.  As I said before, it’s this talent pool that continues to excite me about Twitter and have a strong belief in its future.  With Busch now working on the search product, there’s no doubt that Twitter has an interest in good technology, and helping the community as it grows.  I can’t wait to see what Busch can bring to Twitter.

Horton’s Megaphone – The Competition for Discovery

Posted on by jessestay

There’s a lot of “Buzz” going around lately about Google Buzz being a Facebook or Myspace killer.  Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder and lover of Tesla, goes to the extent of saying with Buzz, Facebook lost half its value.  Thomas Hawk, an amazing photographer and avid FriendFeed user, stated on FriendFeed that Google Buzz is going to “Kick MySpace’s A**”.  While I don’t doubt that Myspace is already having difficulties, I really don’t see Buzz being competition at all for the Facebooks or Myspaces or even Orkuts of this world.  It’s a matter of apples and oranges, or metaphorically speaking, just dust in an elephant’s trunk.

There’s a term I like to apply to the Twitter, Buzz, and FriendFeed phenomenas when compared to Facebook and Myspace and Orkut that I call, “Horton’s Megaphone”.  We all live in a personal world of friends, family, teachers, doctors, and pets.  That’s our reality.  We live in it from day to day and it is what we are most familiar with.  Yet, there’s another reality we all want to be a part of.  Without being heard we’re at risk of missing out on career opportunities, growing our businesses, or maybe even fame or fortune.  There’s a need beyond this current reality to get word about ourselves out to other realities beyond our inner circle of friends and family.  It’s a competition for discovery about who we are.

This is where Horton comes in.  In the Dr. Seuss book, “Horton Hears a Who!”, we see a completely different reality from our own, the “Whos”, whose entire reality exists in just a small speck of dust within our own.  They have mayors and doctors and family and friends and neighbors, and live a grand life.  But when tragedy strikes they are stuck trying to get an alternate reality to hear them.  Their final survival ends up relying on their voices, a megaphone, and an elephant named Horton who had the heart to listen.  “We are here! We are here! We are here!” they shouted in desperation through that megaphone, trying to get the attention of reality.  Sounds familiar.

Buzz is simply that megaphone used to create contact with the real world.  It’s a way we can get word out to alternate realities beyond our own to ensure our own survival as individuals, businesses, and organizations on the internet.  Buzz, Twitter, and FriendFeed are where your own realities get to speak with other realities you would have never come in contact with before they existed.

There is no way Facebook should feel even a little bit threatened by Buzz (unless they’re trying to grow FriendFeed).  They are two entirely different communication mediums.  On Facebook I don’t need a megaphone to communicate with my close friends and family, which it was designed for.  On Buzz I can’t find old friends from High School or even Elementary School, or old clubs or groups I used to belong to like I can on Facebook.  I don’t have groups or shared events or life photos of all those close friends and family.  Facebook is where real life happens.  It’s the Elephant, the real world, reality.  Some call it a “walled garden”.  I call it reality, where everybody knows your name.

Buzz is (and Twitter and FriendFeed are) just an entity of individuals, most which do not know each other and each having their own realities, all trying to compete for the attention of real life.  It’s a different type of communication.  On these platforms it’s a competition for attention (which is why everyone wants to compete for the highest number of followers).  On Facebook (and Myspace and Orkut to an extent) that competition is already won.

Facebook has the holy grail of networks right now – real life connections and relationships that are all able to connect and share with one another.  It is where each and everyone on Buzz wants to be.  The real value is in those real-life connections.  Otherwise we are all just specs of dust in an elephants trunk.

“We are here! We are here! We are here!”

Twitter Testing "OAuth Delegation" With Select Partners – Genius

Posted on by jessestay

A common complaint amongst Twitter developers has been that Twitter’s OAuth, the authentication process you see when you click the Twitter login button on a 3rd party website and go to a Twitter-looking page with a “Allow” or “Deny” button, is too complicated.  Mainly, from a user experience perspective, users are required to leave the 3rd party site completely in order to log into Twitter, then get redirected back to the 3rd party site again.  If anything breaks along the way, the user is left wondering what to do, and valuable logins, purchases, or registrations could be lost.  Facebook has solved this by enabling users to do all the login process via Javascript they provide that produces a popup.  Users can log into Facebook without ever leaving the 3rd party site.  It appears, based on a thread on the Twitter developers list, that Twitter is planning to one-up Facebook by allowing users to log in to 3rd party sites without ever even needing a popup or any type of redirect, and they’re already testing it with select partners.

The topic came up when other developers noticed that the site, TwitPic.com, was allowing direct Twitter logins right on their own website and somehow posts from TwitPic were showing up with the TwitPic name and link next to the post on Twitter.  This normally isn’t possible without enabling OAuth login because Twitter has disabled the functionality for any non-OAuth produced Tweet.  In fact they have said in June of 2010 they will be completely removing the ability to login through Twitter on 3rd party sites via plain-text authentication.  So how is TwitPic doing it?

According to Raffi, an Engineer on the Twitter API platform team, Twitter is currently working on a new “OAuth Delegation” standard that will allow applications to allow users to log in via Twitter on their own sites, while still maintaining the control over Apps that OAuth gives providers and users.  So, on TwitPic, for instance, you can log in to TwitPic.com with your own Twitter username and password right on the TwitPic site itself, yet you’ll still have full control on Twitter.com to revoke access to TwitPic at any time you want to.  In addition, Twitter, at any time, can remove TwitPic’s ability to publish or access the Twitter API since they still have to use OAuth to make Twitter API calls.

If the hints in the developers list thread prove true, developers will be able to take the plaintext username and password, still store them somewhere, but in order to make calls through the Twitter API they’ll have to somehow send an OAuth key with their requests to Twitter along with some way of identifying the user.  My guess is, in essence, the app will send a one-time login on behalf of the user to Twitter (most likely via a secure SSL encryption channel or similar), and Twitter will return to the app an OAuth token to make API requests with on behalf of that user in the future.  In my opinion, this is still no different than storing an OAuth Token in a database that would give apps the same access as their Twitter username and password.

Security Concerns

While storage may be no different, I’m sure there will still be those concerned about this approach.  For instance, what happens when users get used to entering their Twitter usernames and passwords on 3rd party websites and decide to do so on a malicious website?  We’ve seen how used to entering Twitter credentials people get with websites that look like Twitter itself with the rampant phishing attacks recently.

Maybe Twitter is feeling comfortable enough that they can be proactive about such misuses and password collection.  The risk is still there though and hopefully the OAuth Delegation Twitter is getting ready to launch will cover this problem.

Partners

Thus far, it seems TwitPic is one of the partners testing this new delegation standard Twitter is working on.  Several others were mentioned in the developer discussions about this as well.  For instance, Seesmic Look is also taking similar credentials without any OAuth redirect, yet still shows the “Look” source in Tweets generated with the app.  One developer pointed out the information that could be retrieved from the new requests, and the security of it all is a little concerning.

Whatever it ends up being, the winners will be desktop and mobile client developers.  Right now developing a mobile or desktop app involves deep integration into the browser in order to legally get the user logged into the app.  It is why we see so few native desktop clients and so many AIR apps.  AIR is a browser-based solution.

I’m very interested to see what happens.  The Twitter team is supposed to announce more details very soon and I’d like to find out more about what this means for developers, how secure it is, and how much recoding I’ll have to do to enable it in my app.  Whatever it is, you can bet it will be one step simpler than the currently more-simple solution which Facebook provides.  This is getting very interesting!  Let the API wars begin…

Twitter, The New Micro-Spammer and the Need to Fix CAN-SPAM

Posted on by jessestay

Marketers seem to never learn.  Time and time again they have tried to sacrifice loyal relationships with customers in order to take the easy road in hopes to get the small percentage out of millions that might convert into one-time sales.  Affiliate marketing is ripe with these people hoping to “get rich quick”, without regard to how it is done.  I some times wonder if these people would sacrifice their own souls in order to gain a quick buck.  It would certainly seem so as we have been inundated with junk mail and e-mail spam, viruses, worms, porn, and other tools intended to spread what they’re selling to mass audiences in as fast a manner as possible.

Technology has sought hard to stop such problems.  We have anti-virus solutions that stop the malware, but evidently it’s not good enough, because viruses and worms and malware still spread.  Google’s Gmail has excellent spam filtering software for e-mail, as do other services such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.  Yet, I still get spam e-mail.  There are even services which try to stop the amount of junk mail you receive, yet even that isn’t fool proof.  It seems no matter how much technology we throw at it, the spammers will always find a way to circumvent the process.

Government is doing all they can do as well.  Here in the United States, CAN SPAM act makes it easy for government to prosecute against spammers.  The act was meant to thwart the problem in the early 00’s where e-mail spam was running rampant.  The marketers all complained, claiming it would reduce the amount of money they could make, worries of economic crisis ensued.  But after the act went into place, marketers began to realize they were actually seeing more money than before because they were actually focusing on people that were interested in their product, rather than people that weren’t.  I admit a lot of my spam went down at that time.

Enter 2010.  Twitter is almost a standard.  Facebook is almost a standard.  We are seeing the era of micro-messaging take form, and it doesn’t seem this era is going away any time soon.  As with any new communications technology, so come the spammers that come along with it.  As I can attest from my own company, the spammers are now out of control on Facebook and Twitter and almost any other service that enables micro-messaging, and they’re fighting their best to stay on top of it all.  I admit they’re probably doing all they can, too.

On SocialToo in just the last month, we have already automatically marked near 3,500 DM messages as spam out of a total of 3,500 users that utilize the service. Since we implemented the service just a few months ago we’ve marked near 8,500 DM messages as spam. And that’s just DMs on Twitter! Considering there are in the 10s of millions on the service and DMs aren’t the only means of spam, you can see the problem Twitter and Facebook are facing.

It was this reason I added these spam filtering services on top of SocialToo.  I too want to do what I can to help kill these problems.  I’ve seen it all – even people abusing my own service to increase their numbers and in return spam those followers with things their followers never intended to receive.  It was this reason we complied with Twitter’s request to remove automatic unfollow of those who unfollow you recently, and frankly I agree with Twitter on the move – they’re doing the best they can to thwart spammers, and I want to support them in that process.  Look at this video I found on Youtube recently – in it, a man is demoing software that uses a combination of your desktop and outsourced workers in India (likely through services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to quickly create accounts, send a few tweets each to increase, gain, and grow followers, and spam those followers with affiliate links. It’s appalling the way he says this is a “secret” only a “select few” marketers know about – the fact is I already knew about it – it’s no secret:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlHsrSBUVr4&hl=en_US&fs=1&hd=1]

Source: http://www.boblallyblog.net/?p=776 (http://twitter.com/boblally and http://twitter.com/successtoolme)

This guy’s software is just one of many, and I argue it does this the hard way.  Now we have the ability for applications to sit on top of the browser and completely control  the context which a user views the web.  Applications like GreaseMonkey, extensions and plugins, and even Kynetx, while they can be used for good, could all be used in this way with just simple HTML and Javascript to create accounts and spam with them.  There’s not much Twitter or Facebook or even the makers of GreaseMonkey, Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Kynetx can do about them (although Kynetx at least has a controlled user directory through which they can at monitor these things).  There are already tools like Hummingbird out there that do this for relatively cheap, and there will be more.

It’s time Government step in and put an end to this.  CAN-SPAM was written for long-form communications, but it needs to be modified to allow for the short-form. It specifically mentions e-mail and cell phone communications, not micro-messaging services.  Recipients should still have the opportunity to opt-out of the messages they receive. Perhaps the enablers of such communication such as Facebook and Twitter need to provide a means for message senders to provide an opt-out location that attaches to their messages.  That’s just one idea – I’m sure there are many other ways of doing this.

CAN-SPAM needs a provision which specifically targets the micro-messaging space.  It needs communication which specifically says what marketers can do on these services, and how people can opt out.  As I know very well, this will not stop all messages, but it will cut off a large majority of messages, which I know are being used by legit Lawyers and Doctors and business owners everywhere in the US to cost Twitter thousands of dollars and waste the time of countless people.

We need to do all we can to stop this nonsense. I want to see these micro-messaging spammers prosecuted.  It won’t happen unless the US Government modifies CAN-SPAM.  How can we do this effectively in the micro-messaging space?

The Real Solution to Fix the "Twitter Game"

Posted on by jessestay

twitter-gameTwitter has been initiating a crackdown of sorts on sites that offer “automated unfollow” services such as my own SocialToo.com.  Since we announced we were removing it on SocialToo, at least 3 other services have also been asked to remove the functionality, which enables people to automatically unfollow others that unfollow them on Twitter.  I have also noticed Twitter is now cracking down on Twitter accounts that perform this practice.  When chatting with Twitter, their reasoning is that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts”.  Assuming that this is the real reasoning behind the request, I’d like to suggest a more effective means of killing that idea: kill services that allow proactive follow in the first place and follower churn will go away.

Let me first explain what proactive follow is.  There are many services out there right now that enable you to find new followers based on keywords.  You specify search terms, perhaps based on your brand, and these services then go out and find people Tweeting with these keywords, and the service follows those people.  Some will even send a public @mention or DM if they meet your search criteria.  The entire hope is that those people will follow back (note that not everyone does this automatically), increasing your follower count and potential reach.

The problem with this method is that Twitter has limits in place.  As people unfollow you as you are increasing your numbers in this way, soon you will be following way more people than are following you back.  Twitter has a limit right now, in which if you’re following around 10% more of the people that are following you on Twitter, you will not be able to follow any more.  So what happens is these people using these “get more follower” services then use legit services like my SocialToo to unfollow all of the people that have stopped following them, bringing their ratio back in check.  It’s a direct rebellion against Twitter’s rules and regulations, and I don’t blame Twitter for being concerned about it.  In fact, I refuse to allow proactive follow on SocialToo just for this reason – we are not a “get more followers fast” site.  We’re a utility that enables you to manage your Twitter stream better and easier.

So Twitter has come up with the best solution they can come up with – “let’s kill the sites that are providing automatic unfollow and the follower churn will go away”.  The idea being if users can’t unfollow those users that have unfollowed them after they proactively went out and followed everyone, it’s a lot harder to game the system and break Twitter’s rules.  Based on my experience with what users are telling me on SocialToo, this breaks Twitter for many big brands using the service in a legit manner though.  Let me share a few use-cases people are telling me about after we removed it on SocialToo:

Legit Use-Cases for Auto-Unfollow

Some Brands Just Have Big Numbers — On SocialToo we service some really big brands.  Let’s face it: these brands have a lot of followers.  Following those followers back gives their followers a sense that the brand is listening to them.  It’s a PR move, as well as a customer service move because their followers can now DM them.  For instance, I followed @PCSki the other day, hoping to be able to get a spot in for my wife’s and my Ski Vacation to Park City Utah.  Because they followed me back, I was able to keep our conversation private.  This reciprocal follow is an important piece for Brands looking to communicate better with their followers and customers.  @PCSki got a sale (and future blog post) out of me because of that relationship.

Now, assuming we’re dealing with millions of followers, or hundreds of thousands of followers, or even thousands of followers it is absolutely impossible to continue following back the people that follow you based on Twitter’s 10% ratio limit.  If I want to follow everyone back, the fact is about 1/3 to 1/2 of those people I follow back will unfollow me at some point, and my ratio breaks.  I’m then stuck waiting until more people follow me before I can follow back more.  This is bad for brands, especially those with bigger numbers.  If you think numbers aren’t important for a brand, you’re flat out wrong.

Auto Unfollow Kills the Churners — The main reason I created automatic unfollow on SocialToo was because it’s another effective technique at combating spammers if you do auto follow (see above for some good reasons to auto follow as a brand ).  For a good auto follow service to occur, it’s the natural thing to do to offer auto unfollow services as well in order to keep out the spammers you might follow unintentionally.  This is also the reason we offer DM filters and other filtering services on SocialToo.  For those gaming the system, the minute they unfollow me to hope their numbers stay up, I immediately unfollow them as well, and their numbers don’t increase at all.

Auto Unfollow Enables Steady Growth, Despite Friends Unfollowing — if auto unfollow were not available, a typical brand or person wanting to enable auto follow on their account would go as follows: Number of friends increase. Number of friends stay stagnant until ratio is met.  Number of friends increase again.  Steady growth is not attainable with Twitter’s current ratio limit and the lack of auto unfollow.

The Solution

So what can Twitter do?  I understand they’re between a rock and a hard place here.  They could remove the ratio limits, but then the churners (or gamers) would take over again.  They could kill automated unfollow services, but other services will still take over – I can already think of  a good way to create a browser extension that does it on a user-by-user basis if we wanted to.  Also, killing automated unfollow removes the ability for users to defend themselves against the churners.  Twitter could just let the churning happen, but then jealousy happens and people complain (not sure that’s a bad thing as I think people can see through the fakes, but I understand their viewpoint).  Twitter could remove the numbers, only enabling them in private for each individual, but that would remove some of the fun and competition of Twitter.

The only decent solution is to kill the services that are enabling proactive follow.  Disable those enabling the ability to search by keyword and follow based on that keyword.  This is a pure API-based service that Twitter can shut off at the source pretty easily.  Once these are gone, churning, and the “Twitter Game” will be over for those abusing the system.

The Fact is Twitter is About Numbers

While I don’t think Twitter wants people gaming the system to create more numbers, I think Twitter knows that the only way to grow the service is to enable people to increase their number of followers and grow an audience.  If you don’t think that, you’re lying to yourself.  Everyone wants more followers, especially if you’re a brand or business.

Twitter prominently displays follower counts on each user’s page, along with a list of who’s following them, the number of lists they’re on, the number of lists they’ve created, and the list goes on.  Twitter has a Suggested User List  – the entire goal being to give people a larger number of people those people can follow and find interesting things from.  Users get higher prominence in Google if their numbers are higher on Twitter.  Numbers are everything to Twitter, let’s not kid ourselves.

Twitter Needs to Kill the Proactive Follow

The only way Twitter is going to fix the problem they see at hand is to kill services enabling users and brands to go out and proactively find new followers.  Killing the unfollow isn’t going to fix this.  Killing the proactive follow will.  My hope is that, assuming this is the real reason Twitter wants to kill it, Twitter will realize this and give freedom back to their users to continue maintaining their accounts.

As I said on the SocialToo blog – in the meantime, we’re in Twitter’s world and we’re subject to their rules, so until then I’ll do what they tell me.  Let’s hope they’re listening though.  SocialToo provides many more services than just this though, so I’m not worried – I am worried about our users however.

Are there use-cases I’m missing?  How were you using auto-unfollow?