Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

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Ryan Seacrest unfollow

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I’m doing a bit of tidying up on twitter. In the early days of twitter I thought it would be a good idea to follow as many people as possible. What a mistake that was! I now get so much rubbish that it makes twitter unusable as a browsing machine.

So now I’m sat on tweetdeck “unfollowing” people with whom I feel I have nothing in common. It’s amazing who I find I am following. I’ve just deleted someone called Ryan Seacrest who has 2,411,465 followers despite only following 124 people himself. I obviously live sheltered life because I have never heard of him! 2,411,464 people clearly have!

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twitter follower

Friday, September 18th, 2009

When I started to use twitter a little more earnestly I took a look at some other twitterers and determined that there was a pattern in getting lots of followers.  These Tweeters (if that is the right word) were also following lots of people.

So I did the same.  I randomly started to follow people and found that half of them then began to follow me. Of course the downside to this is I get a lot of traffic in my “in tray” with comments from people who I really have no interest in. So much so that it is hardly worth looking at the feed.

I now periodically unfollow people who, after looking their profile, I feel I have nothing in common with. I’m trying to narrow it down to a useful set of “follows”. My criteria are I keep a friend if they are in the UK and look “normal”, in my business space or do seem to have something interesting to say.  There are a lot of people out there spouting rubbish and a lot of “services” that are no use to me – local news alerts in other parts of the world for example.

Spending a little time ”unfollowing”  in the early hours this morning I am astounded to come across some accounts that have huge followers.  One, @DigitalRoyalty, had more than a million! Drilling into her profile I found that she was an online PR specialist. Clearly good at her job.

This is a new world. I feel a little like Captain James Cook setting out on his first voyage of exploration.

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Twitter downed by ddos attack

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I have to apologise to Dave Ward who manages the firewall at Timico HQ in Newark.  I complained to him that he was blocking me from accessing Twitter and he scurried off to check having denied it all. (it’s not a criminal offence in my book anyway).

I just read that Twitter was this afternoon hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack which took out the service for a few hours from around 2pm.  Sorry Dave.  Whenever I publish a blog post Wordpress automatically sends a tweet on the subject which in turn updates my Facebook status. What would we do without Twitter eh?

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Last post for a week but twitter updates will keep coming

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

I’m off on rugby tour to South Africa tomorrow so no blog posts until Thursday 2nd April at the very earliest. Not only would I not trust myself with a laptop on tour but I won’t actually have much time to write as we have a very busy schedule.

That isn’t to say though that the blog will be inactive.  On in the sidebar to the right of this post you will see a stream of tweets that will keep people posted re my progress.  Provided there is mobile phone coverage, and I can’t always be sure of that out in the wild, I will keep the updates coming including how I get on in the two matches we are playing.

You might also, if you are going to be watching the Lions v South Africa second test at Loftus Veersfeld on Saturday, keep your eyes open for me in the crowd.  Thanks to all those who have wished me well on this trip and I look forward to telling you all about it in person at some stage this summer.

I’ll post some pics on Facebook when I get back.

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Email scams

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I went in to BBC Radio Lincolnshire this morning, as is my occasional wont, this time to talk about email scams. I am not particularly a security expert but I guess being in the ISP game I would get more exposure to this than your average Radio Lincolnshire listener.

It was all about phishing emails from people after your bank account details, and especially spoof emails notionally from people you know. As a bit of background research I googled “how to hack MSN” and I was astounded to find 952,000 websites on the subject.

Similarly there was plenty on Twitter and no doubt there will be stuff out there on Facebook and others. I didn’t follow more than a couple of links and the first article had already been removed. It does certainly highlight the vulnerabilities of the web.

I get phishing email daily, mostly caught in my spam quarantine folder, and all of which get ignored/deleted. I do get some very genuine looking spam though appearing to come from reputable contacts.  In one example a business partner of Timico’s had its contact databased copied a number of years ago.  I still get spam appearing to come from this partner.  There is nothing they can do about it. The data is gone.

I have never personally met someone who has been caught out by one of these phishing attempts. Not that is until last night when a friend rang me up and during the conversation mentioned that it had only just happened to him. He was busy and stupidly responded to an email and typed in his bank account details!

Luckily for him the bank spotted an unusual transaction and refunded the cash after calling him to check. It just goes to show how easily it can happen – to the unwary.

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Ideal mobile VoIP client runs on a Blackberry

Friday, May 22nd, 2009
  1. Runs on a Blackberry. In my experience Microsoft push email isn’t reliable enough and I am seriously thinking of changing back to RIM
  2. Can call using any available network - wifi, GSM or 3G – deally can detect least cost route or allow you to set preferred network connection
  3. Has the same inbound number as my work desktop phone so I can seamlessly take the same calls wherever I am – this realistically has to be a fixed line number as you have to be a mobile operator to do it otherwise.
  4. Detects the presence status of my friends and allows me to send Instant Messages to any network.
  5. Active directory lookup for corporate users to avoid having to store all the numbers locally.
  6. High definition voice codec available for use on wide bandwidth connections (ie wifi)
  7. High quality speakerphone.
  8. Multiple VoIP subscriptions so that I can have both work and personal services on the same device.
  9. Front and back facing video (I’m not sure whether I’m kidding myself here!)
  10. All the usual touchscreen/music/GPS/integration with Twitter/Facebook and other social networking websites gadgetty stuff.
  11. Unlimited battery life (hey – I did say ideal mobile VoIP client :-) )

If anyone wants to add to this list feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment.

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Speeches 2 b reduced 2 140 chars at nxt election

Monday, May 11th, 2009

We all have to suffer over exposure to politics during the run up to an election. It is going to get worse!  The next UK General Election will be played out in minute detail and in glorious Web2.0 technicolour using Twitter.

In fact there is now a website dedicated to furthering this cause.  Tweetminster.com is a wonderful resource for those actually interested in politics. The site concentrates the tweets of MPs, sorts by party, constituency and by subject matter and even has a tweetometer that indicates who is ahead in the tweeting game on any particular issue.

You will be an expert on MPs views like never before and the resource makes it easy to engage an MP in debate on a specific topic.

One wonders how we will cope with the sheer volume of information that will be coming at us, other than by switching off of course.  There is definately something advantageous to be said here about the British election system when compared with that of the USA.  At least we will only be getting a few short weeks of it rather than the protracted years they take across the pond. 

I can see another spike in internet bandwidth usage coming..!

If anyone is interested I did a search for the topic “expenses” on tweetminster and came up with 161 references :-)

c u l8r

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twitter in action in Lincolnshire with possible prison riot

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Last night I felt I was part of a real life drama.  I live over the fields from Lincoln prison.  In Lincoln they put the prison in the best part of town to make it quicker to lock up the burglars when they catch them :-)

As I was hitting the hay I could hear a lot of loud noises coming from the direction of the prison together with dogs barking.  I sent out a tweet to this effect and was immediately contacted by a couple of BBC journalists asking for more info.  There have been other prison riots in the UK this week so the tweet was topical.

Independent verifiaction suggested that there was no activity outside the gaol.  After about 10 – 15 minutes I checked again and it grown quiet again.  Presumably the noisy prisoners had been locked back up again.

I guess the point of this post is the observation that twitter is really a newsfeed rather than a social networking tool. You also have to be watching it all the time to catch randomly generated news, as my two BBC contacts must have been. 

It is also usable as a marketing tool and interestingly as such it offers a highly targeted approach.  Twitter users have to be searching for specific news items.  I follow too many people to be able to sensibly catch all their tweets so I would have to be looking for, say, “Lincoln prison riot” to read any news about this. 

The same the applies for product marketing.  If I wanted to push Timico’s MPLS capability on twitter the chances are that people reading that tweet would be specifically looking for information on MPLS.

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Grand National hot tip #GrandNational

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

This is another Twitter experiment.  If anyone really wants to know I have an each way bet on Cloudy Lane and Irish Invader.

Footnote Monday morning:

I wanted to see if the post title would attract many visits via twitter.  It didn’t especially, even though I used the two most popular twitter search strings at the time in the title.

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Twitter experiment

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Twitter has been in the news a lot recently.  It’s been around for 3 years and I started using it a year ago to experiment and to understand what it was all about. 

One year ago it wasn’t really clear where it was all going but I could feel that there would be some uses.  In the meantime celebrities have latched onto it and it has been a way of following news as it happened.  Also my experience with “attending” the SocComm conference via twitter was an education.

I began to get followers who I had never heard of and when looking at their own profiles they had many thousands of followers and were in turn following thousands.  It looked then as if people follow people who follow them.

I began an experiment by randomly following others who were either following or being followed by people that were following me, if you follow my drift.  I got these results:

twitter-trend

There is obviously an increase in followers in line with those being followed.  This not massively scientific but interesting nonetheless. There is a scenario whereby if I spend enough time at it 25% of everyone on twitter would be following me.  Of course I’m not going to waste my time doing it and I’m sure the dynamics change with volume. 

Something that has come out of this excercise is a slight increase in visits to trefor.net due to traffic from twitter.  So if I was focussed on nothing but growth in my readership, which I’m not because I also have a day job,  amassing huge numbers of twitter followers would probably be a good  thing to do.

Also it gets to the point where there is so much twitter traffic it gets difficult to see the wood from the trees.  It then becomes a kind of ticker tape where you randomly glance ast tweets.  Twitter has I’m sure got a lot of evolving to do.

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