swansonager – what is matt up to?

You might want to disable the Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin until Twitter gets the DoS issues sorted out. I had it enabled on one of my blogs and was wondering why traffic was down so much on that blog. It turns out that the Twitter Tools library doesn’t have the proper timeout mechanism in place from a cursory glance. Seeing this in my logs for my blog…

[07-Aug-2009 10:45:53] PHP Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed

Once I deactivated the Twitter Tools plugin, my site is smoking again. Just a quick heads up

A Chicago-based property management company is suing a former tenant for libel, claiming that a Twitter post by Amanda Bonnen “maliciously and wrongfully” accused Horizon Group Management of maintaining a “moldy apartment,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday.

So what’s the moral of this story?

According to PC World’s David Coursey, the first takeaway is to be careful what you say online — you just might get sued.

Maybe so, but for our money, Coursey’s second point — “if you’re a business, realize that filing suit may get you more publicity than the Tweet you are suing over” — is the more likely lesson to endure from this episode. Horizon Group Management seems a likely candidate for the Streisand Effect, that venerable Information Age rule-of-thumb suggesting that attempts to censor information via legal maneuvering tend to motivate people to spread said information much further than they would have if you’d just kept quiet about it in the first place.

Read the full story at:
CRN.com

Laura B (@FTofficefuntime) asked a question about how to tweet a link directly into Twitter last week:
“don’t know how to get that specific link.. you might want to talk about that!”
…so I wanted to let everyone know the easiest way to do just that: tweet a link.

It’s very easy actually. Since Twitter only gives us 140 characters to use in a tweet, we must use them all sparingly. That being said, if you want a URL in your tweet, you probably don’t want to use the full URL to the site you want to link to in your Tweet. The easiest thing to shorten a url is to use a URL shortening service – Bit.ly, TinyURL come to mind but Mashable has compiled a great list of URL Shortening Services as well.

Once you shorten the URL with one of the above services, copy the URL to your clipboard by highlighting it and clicking CRTL-C. If you want to post the link to a blog or a forum, you can easily do so by following the syntax below. Let’s take a quick look using the @Swansonager 20″ Dell Widescreen LCD Giveaway link.

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=@swansonager+contest+to+win+an+19+widescreen+dell+monitor+-+http://bit.ly/5xp0U">Click here to Tweet the Swansonager Contest</a>

You’ll see a couple parts to the URL in the href above:
1. The <a href="YOUR_LINK_HERE"> – The YOUR_LINK_HERE is a place where you’ll put in the link to twitter with the:

http://www.twitter.com/?status={Whatever the status is you want the person to tweet for you}

2. The anchor text for the tweet link (in between the a href tag).

In my case, I use Click here to Tweet the Swansonager Contest so when the user clicks this link, the text I pre-define in my ?status= text will show up like so on Twitter:

And that’s really it. Let me know if you have any questions, but I think you can do it. Try now by tweeting the @Swansonager 20″ Dell Widescreen LCD Giveaway!

And please keep the comments and topics coming

Just because Twitter isn’t making any money right now doesn’t mean that companies aren’t leveraging the platform to rake in sales. Take a look at @DellOutlet – they started tweeting in 2007 and as of late, they’ve become more aggressive with their twitter strategy, they’ve bumped up sales directly attributed to their followers on Twitter to just over $2M.

Read Stefanie’s full post on @DellOutlet and their monetization strategy using their Twitter Followers

@DellOutlet Followers Growth Pace on Twitter

Yup, that’s what I think about Twitter.

Everyday I see people on Twitter following literally thousands of other people. It’s cool and all but at the end of the day, how many people can you physically read about? 20? 50?

Take a look at my spreadsheet below of the top 25 twitter users as of June 9th, 2009. If you toss out the 5 outliers in the group (Britney Spears (britneyspears),Barack Obama (BarackObama),Coldplay (coldplay),The Onion (TheOnion), and NPR Politics (nprpolitics)) who are following way more than anyone else in the top 25, you’ll see the average # of uses the top 25 Twitter users are following is just 108.5 people.

Compare that to the average # of people following the top 25 and you have ~1,165,027 people following the top 25 Twitter users.

 


The BBC has an excellent article today about the content generated on Twitter. They are claiming that 90% of the content is generated by 10% of the Twitter user base. I’ll agree with that. How about you?

Are Twitter and Facebook the next Geocities?

Then a little later on this morning, I see this on my Facebook status updates:

RT @rscheuer: RT @mshraybman: It’s official: Facebook raises $200M from Russian investor . The deal values FB at $10B.

This really got me thinking about monetization of a web property. When a site like Twitter or Facebook get so large, so fast without a true business model in place, what is the long term viability of those services, or any website for that matter. The bigger question is this (imo): Services like (Twitter and Facebook) are conditioning the general web population and everyone as a whole on the web to expect the BMW M3 for free essentially.

Free features rock – but with a COST

Look at all the awesome features that sites like Twitter and Facebook have for anyone to use (photo uploads, video uploads, etc. the list goes on and on) – I know because I use them in my everyday life, many times each day. BUT. Here’s the catch: they are conditioning us to expect FREE services.

Tell me how you can value a company at $10B as this Russian Group pumps in $200 into Facebook to get their paper value that high when we know that if revenues come in at $400M that puts a 25x multiple on them. That’s not a terribly high multiple per se, but the bigger question is the complete monetization strategy for future revenues.

By giving away the farm for free essentially, they are making all us conditioned that we shouldn’t have to pay for anything.

So will Facebook and Twitter become the next Geocities? You tell me… I’d love to hear your thoughts. All I know is that giving away something for free forever is a difficult business model to follow. Just ask Geocities. I’m sure they’ll agree with you.

Related links:

Yahoo! to shutdown Geocities

The Rise and Fall of Geocities