Results tagged “Twitter” from David Kamerer's Spoonful

I often marvel that my iPhone is smarter than my computer. This is because the phone knows where it is. On the iPhone, a Google search turns up local options at the top of the list. The iPhone knows which buses go by this street, and when they arrive. When I'm traveling, I can pull off at exit 275, and the phone knows which hotels are nearby, making it easy to find the best deal for the night.

Marketers are licking their chops over this. It's one thing to have a thousand friends on Facebook. But businesses want customers. They want to drive transactions. Location-based services close the gap between relationships online and IRL ("in real life").

Any discussion of location-based services must include Twitter, even though Twitter is not directly a player in the location-based services marketplace. What Twitter does bring to the party is the largest mobile social network, real-time data and the open API that breeds third-party invention and reinvention. Most location-based services seamlessly integrate with Twitter.

Twitter has added geolocation to its database (to turn it on, log in to your account, and go to settings > account). While Twitter does not post your location, third-party applications can now access it. Twitter is essential for the growth of location-based services because it is by far the largest mobile social network as well as the also the largest real-time network.

Today, the hottest location-based service is Foursquare, which Mashable's Pete Cashmore has called "Next Year's Twitter."

Foursquare links to your Twitter account, and broadcasts your location and comments to people in your network. As you visit places, you "check in" and in the process unlock badges. The highest badge, Mayor, entitles you to discounts and other offers. Foursquare was developed by some of the team from Dodgeball, an earlier company that was acquired by Google. While Google has a location-based service (Latitude), the company doesn't appear to have done much with Dodgeball.

Foursquare functions as a "Saturday night leaderboard," for friends across the city. It helps answer the question, "Where is the fun tonight?" Soccer moms use Foursquare to arrange play dates.

While this sounds fun (and also trivial), it's important to think about this important characteristic: on Facebook, we talk, but getting together is an abstract concept. Foursquare drives interaction in real life. Think about your last visit to a coffee shop, with all those autonomous individuals in their own little bubbles, typing away on their netbooks. Foursquare has the potential to link those people together. Definitely a good thing.

Foursquare has just published its API, which means that programmers will be taking the code, mashing it up and creating new applications. This is exactly the same sort of innovation that has driven the success of Twitter, so give it some time and pay attention to how the service changes. The next killer app could be in here somewhere. 

Foursquare has also just expanded to new cities. To see a complete list, visit Foursquare's home page and look on the bottom right of the screen.

Foursquare and Latitude are but two of many emerging services that wrap up social features with real-time data and geolocation. Also in the mix are Loopt, Gowalla, Layar, Whrrl, Brightkite and Buzzd. Can you say shakeout?

While these emerging services may seem like silly uses of such powerful technology, I urge you to try one or two, and think about how they might evolve given the right mix of people, hardware and imagination.

We'll revisit location-based services and discuss some of the players in future posts.

The elections in Iran have yielded fierce protests worldwide over the validity of the outcome, electing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over popular rival Mir Hussein Moussavi. While the results certainly look fishy, I'm not qualified to assess them. However, protests in Iran and worldwide continue to put pressure on Ahmadinejad's regime.

While Iranian citizens are protesting and fighting in the streets, they are also communicating with the world on popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The New York Times reports that one virtue of Twitter is that it's harder to block than other networks because members can access it from mobile devices, cell phones and computers.

Outside of Iran, people are aiding the protest, too. They're:

• setting up proxy servers and making them available in Iran, helping citizens escape government censorship of the web;

• launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against the Iranian government's web infrastructure;

• instructing people outside of Iran on how to help, not hurt, the opposition. See this list of instructions from Boing Boing.

• talking, blogging and tweeting the news, putting pressure on mainstream news outlets to continue or increase coverage. Tweeters are turning their avatars green in a show of support of the resistance.

Reporters have been banned from sharing news from Iran with the outside world. If you would like to read news from participants and citizen journalists, try these resources, as suggested by PC World and others:

The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan's blog, contains videos and commentary

On Twitter: Twazzup has created a mashup of relevant Twitter resources; check it out. Or search for the hashtags #iranelection or #gr88

Images on Flickr: mousavi1388, parsaoffline, sharif

Conversation is a powerful tool to fight fascism. And social networks give conversations about Iran a media-rich megaphone. The whole world's watching - and talking.

But there's a cost: all of these pipes are filling up with junk. Junk people writing junk messages, junking up the channels of communication. Junk, junk, junk. So good luck finding an original thought:

Or a spammer.

Brandjacking is a growing problem online. On Twitter, both Motrin and Exxon-Mobil have had unknown individuals posing as themselves. And now, one of my favorite thought leaders in social media, Jeremiah Owyang, has been brandjacked. (Twitter has the problem under control).

This will continue because it's easy, there's no real penalty if you get caught, and there are lots of jerks out there, running lots of hustles.

So here's a modest proposal: charge for the service. Like $1 a year. A buck. Seriously.

Why?

It forces each user to provide a real name and real address, which is verified when the charge is run through the credit card companies. That alone would knock down the Twitter spam, which frequently comes from one individual using multiple accounts. A credit card also ensures the holder of the account is of a certain age. When the account renews yearly, it gives people a chance to get off the service. It would give Twitter a much richer database once the service is monetized.

A buck is just a speed bump, enough to slow down the spammers and liars, minimally disrupting legitimate users. It's a small lever that Twitter can use to protect its network.

And what would Twitter do with the money? It could make a modest donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or some other cause that improves the online experience. 

Niall Cook writes about good Twitter practice for corporations at The Customer Collective.

A very useful study on Twitter from H-P Labs, Social networks that matter: Twitter under the Microscope, with useful annotations from Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

Ogilvy PR 360 slide deck on Twitter, from SlideShare.

follow me @DavidKamerer

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Remember when you were young and full of innocence? You know, about a thousand tweets ago?

If you'd like to recapture that special first time, check out MyTweet16, which will show the first 16 tweets of any person you care to stalk investigate learn about. You know, how they tweeted "back in the day." Sometime in September or October, most likely (Twitter has grown that fast).

The open API that Twitter runs on is sparking lots of innovation and reinvention, always a good thing with new media. Everyone can get their hands on a piece of the Twitter experience. Here are some more Twitter tweaks:

FriendorFollow - Who are you following? Who is following you? This service helps you manage the reciprocity of your Twitter follows/followers from three easy-to-understand windows. Worth a look every so often to keep your Twitterverse in balance.

Mr. Tweet - your Twitter valet service. Follow Mr. Tweet (for some reason I can't stop thinking about Homer Simpson as "Mr. Plow") and Mr. Tweet will suggest people who should be in your network.

Twitbacks - free custom Twitter background themes. (or you could go old school and wrangle the pixels yourself; I suggest creating an image 2048 pixels wide by 1707 pixels high at 72 ppi; save out the finished art as a .jpg. And please, make it pretty).

Also, very much worth a read: Why I love Twitter, by Tim O'Reilly (yes, THAT O'Reilly).

If you've been contemplating joining the Twitter community, here's some excellent advice on getting started from David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. This book, by the way, is an excellent introduction to using social media.

One way to get going is to generate a feed of Twitter users in your community. You can do this at twitterlocal, or by using the advanced search function at Twitter.

Another approach? Figure out who the power Twitter users are, and follow them. Or, you could follow the top Tweeters at TwitterGrader, which purports to analyze the influence of Twitter users.

But don't look for me on the list. I'm taking Twitter pass/fail.

Follow me @davidkamerer

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One of the nice things about Twitter is that other developers have taken the API and built useful extensions that leverage Twitter's power. You can take control of your Tweetosphere with these handy tools, posted by Brian Solis at PR 2.0, one of my favorite public relations blogs.

The tool I'm most excited about is GroupTweet. You can use GroupTweet to create a workgroup and then share private tweets amongst the team members. The tweets remain outside of your public Tweetstream. Handy for workgroups of any size, or perhaps as a discussion forum for an online class (or physical class, for that matter).

Here's another batch of Twitter tools you'll want to explore. Also, be sure to spend some time with Twitter Search if you're at all interested in reputation management.

iPhone user? Consider Twitterific, a free product available from the Icon Factory.

Follow me on Twitter @DavidKamerer

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Of course I'm interested in Twitter. So I signed up for an account, found some friends, and started watching ... and tweeting. But the thing is, I really have nothing to say. I'm happy to share my life with my friends, but reluctant to share it with the world. 

My interest in Twitter stems from using it in workgroups, for professional applications, to document a one-time event in real time. I see lots of uses.

But if you want to know "what I'm doing" you're sure to be disappointed. I may be organizing my sock drawer. Or something else equally boring. Or I may be doing something positively brilliant. But it's not for sharing. At least not with the entire world.

Ack! Angelinos chose C in large numbers, as witnessed in this wonderful interactive graph put together by the LA Times (be sure to scroll down and mouse over the graph). 

Personally, I'm going to grab my guitar and get out of Dodge. But my hat's off to you, you scrappy SoCal survivors!

Oh, one more thing. I guess Twitter is a mass medium, a news wire.