29/05/2008
What Women Want…………..When Twitter Goes Down
Courtesy of iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik (Tasty Blog Snack)
BizExcellerated Internet Marketing: Achieve mastery in blogging, affiliate marketing, social traffic generation at Andrew Wee
Courtesy of iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik (Tasty Blog Snack)
Twitter continues to be log-jammed, and I think every social network – MySpace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, all go through this phase.
In the case of MySpace, it’s become the hotbed of unmoderated bulletin spam and private message spam for ringtones, free ipod/xbox360/nintendo WII email/zip submit offers. I bet it’s going to take some doing to clear all that muck.
With Facebook, they’re taken the opposite tack of placing a cap on the number of private messages you can send out, limiting the ability of popular group owners to communicate with their members – forcing some to set up off-site bulletin boards to send broadcast messages out.
With MyBlogLog, the platform has a built a good userbase with its blog widget (though guys like Shoemoney had showed that it was pretty easy to abuse the “recent visitors” feature of it). The major sticking point is that Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have a concrete social media strategy (or at least an integrated one in place). I’m still hoping to see some of its community features like it’s Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, Mash social platform and MyBlogLog properties come together. And in my book, come together means more than a single unified Yahoo! login to tie the pieces together.
Even a 1-2 page weekly or bi-weekly updates or “What’s Hawt!” newsletter would serve to bring some of the pieces together…
So what’s the deal with Twitter’s sputtering and throttling down the flow of data?
With Twitter, I suspect it’s the (more…)
Looks like Twitter is fast becoming a victim of its own success.
Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.
When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).
In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.
This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.
Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.
If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below:
I’m getting snowed under, even with following 92 twitterers, possibly because I live 12 hours in the future (GMT+8 vs GMT-5 for most Americans), and there’re pages of back tweets when I wake up every morning and check out my twitter account.
I am probably behind the curve when it comes to picking up new-fangled technology, unlike Shawn Collins, Scott Jangro and Sam Harrelson.
On a recommendation from Kerri Morrison (AKA @kmore) , I checked out Twitterific.
Oh great…it’s Mac-only. I typically keep my MacBook on a pile of Cat5 ethernet cables under my desk most of the time and I don’t think I’ll be firing it up, so I can burn more time on twittering…
Twhirl looks like a better alternative – it’s Windows and Mac OS X and I see a number of people sending updates using it.
I’ll probably check this out.
Anyone have experience? What do you recommend?
I don’ think I’ll venture into Pownce territory till next week, as there’s quite a bit of site development on a couple of new verticals I’m working on.
Perhaps it’s a sign of growing pains (good pains!), but a number of twitterers (i guess it’s a nicer term than “twits”) have mentioned that twits are not appearing in their twitter stream…which could be a concern for some, especially as twitters @ other users and direct messages are fast replacing email and IM for a number of the users.
I was a little surprised that some conversations seemed to be ending mid stream, till I went to the individual twitter stream (typically twitter.com/(username) ) and saw the continuation of our conversation there.
So, if that chatty blonde suddenly stops chatting, go over to her twitter page and see if she’s replied.
I’d also be prepared just in case “she” is a gold farmer/credit card collector over in Russia or China too…
As a form of consolation, twitter has posted an update that they’re recovering missing twits and will be inserting them into your twitter stream. If you’re a heavy volume twitter user however, it might be faster to check individual pages before the torrent or updates pushes the re-inserted twits off your archived pages.
Oh yes, Twitter gets my vote for “digital crack” for the more social among us. I think the Type As and the hack-and-slashers will be still hypnotized by Kongregate.
One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.
Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.
A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.
Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.
At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson
About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.
Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLyn’s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.
But I’m not so keen to talk about the discussion as to look at how it took place.
Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.
In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.
Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.
It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.
Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.
If you factor in the fact that (more…)