Social Media

I always wondered how celebs with common names take ownership of their names on twitter. R&B singer Ciara didn’t join twitter until last year, yet she was able to get the name @Ciara.  And what about people who pretend to be other celebs…how does twitter handle that?

I ran across this article about the NFLPA and its quest to get the @nfllockout twitter handle away from some fans who actually had it before the NFLPA put up NFLlockout.com.

On October 4, Shetty, a medical student, said he was contacted over e-mail by union officials who mentioned that they had NFLLockout.com and NFL Lockout on Facebook. Shetty said they proposed some items they could give the trio of friends in exchange for the handle. In the end, Shetty, Barbuto and Tomasetto were unsatisfied with the offers.

“I’m 30 years old,” Shetty told CNBC. “I don’t need a lifesize poster of Mike Vick on my wall.”

After negotiations failed Shetty soon received this e-mail from Twitter:

“Hello,

We received a valid report from the NFLPA regarding your original username, @NFLLockout. After our team reviewed your account, the use of the name ‘NFLLockout’ was deemed to be confusing under our entity impersonation policy. To resolve confusion going forward, we added two underscores to your username, now @NFLLockout__, and released the username to the reporting entity for their active use on Twitter. Also, please note attempting to sell a Twitter username is against Twitter’s Terms of Service.”

The article goes on to say that Twitter added two underscores to Shetty’s account and promptly handed the regular NFLLockout account over to NFLPA.

Couple observations: 1. If this is how the NFLPA negotiates, the NFL will definitely be having a lockout. 2. Twitter has time to handle name disputes for “power” players but still cannot keep the site up consistently or delete inactive accounts. Inactive accounts are squatting on names people need so they can avoid putting a million numbers and underscores in their handles. And two, they’re inflating follower counts like crazy.

Sidebar: Shetty says they never intended to sell the account and they didn’t think the name would ever be useful. Okay. If you say so.

This is the first time I’ve written anything about Sarah Palin since 2009 when a writer over at The Grio tried to illustrate Palin’s so-called commonalities with black women. Needless to say, I took issue with that on my personal blog. But mostly, since Palin and McCain were roundly beaten in the Presidential election, I’ve ignored Palin’s existence because she’s pretty much irrelevant.

On Friday, I decided to use tweetdeck’s trusty global filter, to mute all tweets with the words “Sarah Palin” or “Glenn Beck” in them. Quite frankly, I’m tired of people on the left making a big deal over every single thing Palin and Beck say. The obsession the left has with “calling out” people like Palin is a massive waste of time. When I mentioned this on twitter, of course people disagreed saying that Palin and Beck are influential and that we have to speak out against people who threaten our…something…or other. Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t care.

It’s time for the left to take responsibility for Palin. Sure the right made her relevant insofar as the election was concerned. But after that, her existence and any remaining attention she’s gotten has been provided to her by the liberal crowd–whether it was Oprah’s questionable decision to have her on her show to promote her “book” or the constant overreactions to every idiotic thing she says.

This is a pattern with the left and it feeds into Palin’s plans. If people remember, way back after the election when conservatives governors met for their annual meeting, the media kept asking whether or not Palin was a leader in the party. GOP Governors and members of Congress spent the entire week trying to shrug off questions about the moose-hunting mother of five. It was clear they didn’t know what role, if any, she should play in their party going forward. Even her speaking role at the conference was begrudgingly allowed. But the mainstream media and the media on the left continued to make her role an issue.

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I don’t have a 4 square account and I doubt I will get one. I don’t think I go that many cool places that I need to “check in.” But who knows, fall is my favorite time of year and thus the time when I’m busy and more likely to do things that will make all of you envy me.

Right now I doubt anyone wants to see me “check in” to Kaiser North Capitol or Harris Teeter Jenkins Row. Nevertheless many of you are using 4square, and I’m sure some of you love when you see people you don’t want to run into check in somewhere that way you know NOT to go there.

Just like everything else, there’s an app to help you with that. It’s called Avoidr.

From Mashable:

Basically, the app works as a plugin for your Foursquare account (much like apps like Assisted Serendipity, but even more simple). You can label your Foursquare friends with a variety of colorful terms, and then choose to hit “Avoid.” Clicking on “Places to Avoid” will yield a list of venues at which your foes are currently present. Unfortunately, it appears as though this is only a web-based app. It would be much more useful if it e-mailed or pinged you alerts, like the aforementioned Assisted Serendipity.

I think this is a cooler use of technology than telling people were you are. For the full write up on the app and to see what it looks like, head over to Mashable.

I know that any Desiree Rogers post is supposed to be about whether or not she’s qualified to be the person to take Jet and Ebony magazines to the next level, then you should insert the obligatory mention of the White House state dinner crashers and her subsequent resignation as White House Social Secretary, and definitely don’t forget to introduce speculation as to whether Rogers is a diva.

But you know I can never follow the script

Now that we’ve got all the basics out of the way. While reading a Chicago Sun-Times article on Rogers’ new position as CEO of Johnson Publishing Co. I was very concerned about this quote:

Rogers said she intends to expand Ebony and JET magazines’ popular features online and create communities around them. One idea: To highlight JET magazine’s “Beauty of the Week” online, post a video, host an advertising sponsor, publish a question-and-answer column, ask readers to vote on whether this week’s beauty is more exciting than last week’s, and hold online contests around the theme.

To that I say two things: No and hell no.

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Today I was going to blog about house-intruder-victim-turned-internet-sensation Antoine Dodson. But I decided I needed another day with that post to make sure I’m saying what I wanna say you know what I’m saying?

In the meantime, I might as well talk about one of my favorite past times–twitter. For me, twitter has served a lot of purposes. It’s a way to promote my writing, chat with likeminded (and not-likeminded) individuals, and past the time away when I feel like procrastinating or being lazy. I don’t think that the people who founded twitter thought that people would use twitter as an all-day-multi-purpose tool.  I think it’s also clear that twitter wasn’t prepared for the way that  twitter clients like tweetdeck, echofon, and Ubertwitter would alter its landscape [who cars about promoted or regular trending topics when you're tweeting from mobile?] The host of changes twitter is trying out proves this point.

Out of all the changes, the one that’s most annoying has GOT to be the twitter follow suggestions. Oh boy, where do I begin. Let me first say that a lot of us left myspace and facebook because of the freedom to pick and choose who we associate with more easily and with less emotion than can be achieved on sites where the motive to join is to connect with people on more than a conversational level. Twitter is just about the conversation, anything else is extra.

The problem with Facebook’s friend suggestion is that it makes uncomfortable suggestions–whether it asks you to follow abusive ex-boyfriends or people who are already deceased, many of us want no parts of it. Though facebook’s friend suggestion component is annoying, it’s understandable for its business model and fairly nonintrusive. Overall, Facebook benefits by helping people increase the amount of friends they have.

However, for heavy twitter users, friend suggestions aren’t effective. Most of us follow and unfollow people at will. Because twitter can involve heated debates between strangers and ongoing strings of conversation, the relationships on twitter tend to be more intimate. Many times you unfollow people simply because you can no longer stand their bullshit. Now, twitter will suggest you refollow the bullshit rather than leaving well enough alone. What twitter doesn’t understand is that for communities of tweeters, the reason for unfollowing someone can be much more complicated than simply no longer being interested, informed or entertained by their tweets.

Before this, the automatic twitter RT button was the most glaring example of proof twitter doesn’t understand a lot of its base. People do NOT like strange avatars in their feeds and there are some people who are retweet addicts, and the twitter RT function is their cyber cocaine. Twitter has giveth and taken away and then giveth again the ability to block someone’s twitter RTs from showing up your timeline without having to unfollow them.

Twitter seems to be struggling with how to maintain and engage its users. But most people who are on twitter for any bit of time learn how to do this on their own. What might be helpful, since a significant amount of people tweet once or twice and give up on twitter, is for twitter to provide suggestions for who a person should follow during their first weeks on twitter. Maybe even make a “you should follow” site where people can type in search terms to find people they may want to follow and converse with. But the algorithm needs to be much more complicated than simply allowing search access to user names or twitter handles.

Right now, twitter clients’ suggestions for follows include a lot of celebrities, and once again, frequent twitter users know that unless you’re in high school celebrities are the site’s most unfulfilling follows.

What do you all think? Does twitter understand us?

A few weeks ago I took a break from most of social media,  blogging, and reading most blogs. I think this is something all heavy users of the web should do from time to time. The best thing about the internet is that it puts you in touch with various opinions and a wide variety of information. But the downside of the internet is that it puts you in touch with various opinions and a wide variety of information. Sometimes it’s all too much. And as a voracious reader, I was consuming a high volume of information that was affecting me.

During my week and a half break, I mainly read the Washington Post and NY Times, the Daily Caller (don’t ask), and The Atlantic. I stayed away from all of the comment sections except for the ones at The Atlantic, in particular the blog maintained by Atlantic Senior Editor Ta-nehisi Coates. Well, actually, I strayed into the Daily Caller comment section ONCE and quickly learned my lesson.

Within about two days, I realized that The Atlantic is probably my favorite place to hang out on the web. But it’s not just because of the great writing,  it’s because they do a really good job of cutting down on the filth people log online to spew and the Atlantic writers play a role in that. It makes for a greater web experience for all involved.

For that reason, I think more web sites should look at ways to implement some sort of comment moderation. I know that to some this may seem like censorship, but in going through comments on even higher brow sites like the Times, it’s amazing what people create accounts to say. I think a lot of those people probably aren’t even regular readers of the site content but log in to be mean about a particular subject. I think censorship of deliberate meanness is okay. Seems like papers are realizing how uncomfortable the lack of moderation makes some of us, CNN reports that more papers are are reigning in this atrocious behavior.

Some companies are even beginning to outsource their comment moderation and I’m seeing a growing use of Disqus which allows commenters to flag inappropriate comments and “like” substantial ones. I hope this is a sign that there is a growing desire among web users to monitor what’s said–the same way content that is uploaded is monitored on many sites. Without web content monitoring we’d be subjected to a lot of very bad images and comments. The NY Times tackled the subject of the psychological consequences for people who monitor web content. What an obscure but interesting topic!

Anyway, web owners know that without censoring some content, their web site will become a haven for unseemly people and behavior. I think this is a big part of why myspace fell off in popularity. They just didn’t do a good job separating PG-13 myspace from its XXX alter ego.

Overall, I feel more comfortable commenting on sites where there is some sort of commenter accountability. I’m not saying that every site should make visitors audition in order to comment, but comment moderation not only discourages ignorance and maliciousness, it also leaves room for the reasonable commenters to focus on elevating the discourse between each other rather than getting bogged down in the negativity others bring to a given site.

Although most small blogs tend to be comment hungry–comments are another way of proving readership–I delete any and all offensive comments. There’s simply no place for that here. I wouldn’t want anyone having to take a break from my site.

Update: Salon.com posted an article defending anonymous and vile commenting. I responded here. The crux of the writer’s point is that if we censor these people we lose touch with real America and that vile comments prove that racism still exists and that the education system fails some people. While I think that’s an interesting and entertaining point, if people need to read filth to know that these are still social issues, we’ve already lost the battle. Long before the internet existed we were able to identify and correct social ills. Fancy that.

Update: One last point about comments. Many bloggers try to appeal to EVERYONE, a general audience. That’s not my goal on this blog. I am looking for a SPECIFIC type of reader. In order to reach that type of reader I take lots of measures: 1. I focus my posts 2. I monitor the length of posts 3. I try to insert discussion points into my posts as much as possible, and 4. I moderate the comments. Comment moderation is not a stand alone strategy.

Twitter has become the social media tool du jour. The number of users keeps growing and those who are active users are typically on the site for the better part of the day. Still, twitter runs much like a beta site…even when the site isn’t showing the dreaded “fail whale” there are other issues that a site with such a large user base simply shouldn’t have. There are 5 things I’d like to see twitter do immediately. I didn’t include fixing their servers because I figured that’s a given!

1.  Fulfill It’s Promise to Delete Inactive Accounts After 6 months

Since a significant amount of tweeters use their accounts once or twice and then never tweet again, there are a large amount of accounts with really great screen names that aren’t active. That means active users are using all sorts of underscores and numbers to build screen names. Twitter would be a much better experience for everyone if the most active users had the most memorable names.

Further, though twitter has done a great job dealing with its bot-follower issue, inactive accounts contribute greatly to inflated follower counts. This makes it difficult for the average user to gauge the “reach” of their account i.e. how many people are actually viewing their tweets on a daily basis

2.  Give Me Control of My Old Tweets!

I don’t know about you, but in the year that I’ve been active on twitter, I’ve dropped some gems! Also, I’ve changed the way in which I use my account. It’d be great if twitter would do one of two things. Either upgrade the service so that users can access their old tweets OR give users the option to delete all previous tweets.

Now that the Library of Congress will have access to all the tweets (not sure how this is going to happen) it’s even more imperative that tweeters have access to them as well. I think that social media companies have gotten lax with privacy and rules regarding what they will do with information contained on a site. The assumption remains that anything you post is accessible. The problem is, accessible doesn’t mean that someone else owns my posted thoughts and should have the ability to completely eliminate any personal control I may want to exert over the “information” I provide.

3.  Let Me Have My Favorites

Right now, on my personal twitter account, I have just over 1000 tweets favorited. It’s one thing for twitter to not allow me to access tweets from March 2009, it’s something entirely different not to be able to scroll through a list of 1000 tweets. Since those tweets are not accessible it almost makes me wonder how twitter expects users to use the favoriting function.

4.  Make Direct Messages Deletable En Masse

Twitter routinely deletes direct messages (which is a separate issue I could complain about but won’t), but doesn’t make older direct messages accessible in any way. Once conversations begin to build in your DM box it becomes difficult to scroll beyond the DMs you want to keep to get to the ones you don’t. Most people that I know have hundreds if DMs–I personally have 800. In order to access DMs 1-700 I’d have to take a lot of time to delete them one by one.

5.  Fix the Search Function

Part of twitter’s appeal is the ability to find likeminded individuals talking about subjects that interest you. The search function is good about two weeks back (unless the topic is particularly hot and then you can go back about 3 days if you’re lucky). Often when scrolling through the search page, twitter freezes. Imagine starting a search over once you’ve gone back 6 or 7 pages. Talk about frustrating.

Those are the top 5 things I’d like twitter to do right now. Feel free to contribute others.