Notes from a wireframe world

Using Twitter Effectively, is my new Electronic and Hard copy book.

The blurb reads

Using Twitter Effectively, is the idea introduction to Twitter, starting with a brief introduction to the service, it goes on to cover the basics of setting up an account and making friends as well as the major tools for twitter. Using Twitter Effectively, even covers how not to do twitter. Gain followers and impress people by “Using Twitter Effectively”.

I hope you enjoy the book and find it useful (and maybe buy the hardcopy :)

The founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington one (if not the) most popular technology bloggers has been “grabbed, pulled, shoved and otherwise abused at events”[1] and at the start of this year spat at[1] by throes who feel aggrieved that TechCrunch didn’t cover their startup. Of course running a start-up can be very stressful (as well as very fun), but not only are such attacks on bloggers hideous, but IMHO for most start-ups TechCrunch isn’t the be all and end all of publicity anyway!

Take for example my start-up, Sahakara . Yes, when I launched it I dropped TechCrunch a line and of course they completely ignored it. Was I heartbroken? Did I feel the need to break into Michael Arrington house? No. because TechCrunch readers aren’t my target audience. Who reads TechCrunch? Two groups, people like me (Enterperners and people interested in tech) and vulture venture capitalists. I’m not after huge stacks of cash (thro I’d like enough to pay myself full time for a year), and tech people aren’t my primary audience (environmentally friendly and broke people are), so what does TechCrunch get me?

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/28/some-things-need-to-change/

In resent weeks I’ve noticed a strange trend on Twitter, I call it “ghost following”. It involves people following someone then unfollowing them straight away. Since twitter notify you about new followers but not unfollowers, you check out their profile and follow them.

This is strange for a number of reasons. Firstly I can’t understand why someone would want to do that. So you have a huge follower to followed ratio… So what? What does it matter? (maybe someone can use the comments to explain this to me)

The second thing I can’t understand about this is that it works! To me twitter is a cross between a big chat room and a information source, if I’m interested in what someone has to say I’ll follow them, if I’m not I won’t, and more importantly thats how I view what others. So if you follow me I assume it’s because your interested in what I’ve got to say, So when I next get time to look at your twitter feed, I see if I’m interested in what you have to say, but just because your interested in me doesn’t mean I’m going to be interested in you.

Just as everyone has a different type of partner they fancy, people have different interests just because your interests aren’t my interests, doesn’t mean that the stuff you have to say is worthless, just that it doesn’t directly interest me.

So don’t be offended if you follow me and I don’t follow you back, we just have different interests.

The same goes for re-tweeting. Unless you have something like TweetDeck running, re-tweeting involves a lot of cutting and pasting, and is a pain to do, so I don’t expect you to ever re-tweet something I post, if and when people do, that great and I try to thank them (it is after all a pain to do so), but in my eyes the only reason to do so is if you think there tweet is something you wish you had said.

That makes the tendency that people seam to have of adding “Please RT” to the end of every message at best laughably and worst, 9 Characters wasted. They may as well add “Please click” to every link, I also wonder if these people go around saying reminding there friends to breath, eat, drink and go to the toilet. Let me make this clear, if I want to re-tweet something, I’ll re-tweet it, I don’t need you to tell me to do so.

So if I don’t follow you back, don’t be offend, if I don’t re-tweet something of yours, don’t be offended, and I won’t be offended if you don’t re-tweet my stuff or follow me.