Twitter: The Slowest Biggest Startup Ever

For something so high tech and new, not to mention game changing, looking at Twitter's system updates is like looking into the lens of the past. It's like when big companies finally decide to use social media, but they are 2 years behind and just doing it because everyone else is. It just feels so weird, like what planet are they on, we've had this stuff forever and you are just rolling it out now...and to the website?! Who the HELL even uses the website? It's like using IE 6 to surf the internet, sure it can be done, but it's hella-inefficient and there are no tabs!

Yeah I know they are taking it slow to the party and then annoyingly eating up all the competition, killing businesses that capitalized on their slowness, but it seriously seems like they move at the speed of a company 100 times their size. I guess when you build a crappy platform that doesn't scale, you don't have much time to deal with everything else, and if you already have tons of money with no competition you don't really need to innovate either. Kind of reminds me of a number of big local companies...

Anyways, just wanted to point out the observation of how backwards they seem to what you might think without thinking. And yeah I know most people don't use some sort of Twitter Client...But man are they missing out!

Another Twitter Shirt Meme Attempt...More Lessons Learned!

Wow, totally lamesauce! There's always competition on the Internet, even when it's localized and real-time!

Shortly after the quake I tweeted about how it was my first earthquake and got this reply about how I can say I survived the Quake, I rushed as fast as I could (using a slow work comp with an overworked lagging firefox) to make a shirt on CafePress for the lulz. It's been about 2 hours and I'm up to 498 clicks! Tons of retweets and hashtag comments. It's always fun to see how fast it spreads as I've done this once before here. I looked at a number of the retweeters and could tell a bunch were clearly connected to my network, and a few various others that seemed random. It would be cool to see some sort of weblike visualization and I'm sure there is a twitter app for that, but I'm just too lazy to sift through hundreds to find it.

I was about to comment on how it's interesting to see someone I follow retweet me through someone else who isn't following me, so I went to follow the trail and found it went dead 2 people in. I was like hunh? Wait, that's not even my link! Some other dude also made a shirt, but at another site (and with much better skill). Argh, he's a TO guy so he had a huge TO network retweeting it like mad and mucho facebook sharing (which I didn't want to bother spamming). I wonder if he had the same idea, or saw mine and rushed to copy it to compete/look original? Also saw a few replies with others who made shirts. I guess it's a popular meme! The difference in the slogans being that he called it the Toronto Quake, which just goes so well with this tweet:

Toronto's ego is having a hard time letting go of the fact that it wasn't the epicentre of the earthquake.

I guess I'll have to be even more original next time! I should have quickly registered the domain and made a music video instead >:( Goddamn work interfering with my spontaneous plans for 5 minutes of twitter fame!

Into Heavy Metal and Twitter?

I'm a huge Metalhead, and that's no secret! Most people can tell by looking at me or by my multitude of tour shirts I wear when not at work. Well, as a huge user of Twitter, I've been a part of the #Metal community for awhile and I'm always looking for ways to enhance it. This lead me to many adventures and one particularly great endeavour that resulted in quite the acquisition (if I do say so myself!).

I am now the proprietor and operator of the World's first, only, and >>BEST<< Heavy Metal URL Shortener!

Akin to the likes of bit.ly, is.gd, and tinyurl who provide much of the shortening of links via Twitter, I have brought Met.al to the list!

If you are a Metalhead, please feel free to make use of it, and if you know of any other Metalheads, please share the word!

The site features a bookmarklet for shortening pages on the fly, and now we have released a WordPress plugin which upon publishing a new post will automatically shorten the URL and tweet it for you along with the post's title and any other information you choose! We even have an API you can take advantage of!

So far it's been a pretty big success I think and more and more people are starting to use it.

Anyways I realize I haven't posted in awhile, and just wanted to keep some of you in the loop as to what I'm up to.

For those of you who are curious, I have tried to get the domain metal.com, the owner is currently a rich lawyer who runs his own firm, he said when I can make him an offer in the low six digits, he'll talk!

I'll write another post one day about how I obtained the Met.al URL, it wasn't easy and took a long time, but totally worth it!

#heweb09 Disaster Fun!

I was lucky enough to be following someone on Twitter who was actually attending #heweb09, and consequently putting out some of the best tweets too!

I first noticed a bunch of snarky tweets, which are always intriguing, and then I noticed the hashtag and decided to check it out. I was very amused to find, in real time, a conversation going on about a really shitty ass keynote speaker! The comments painted a picture of him in my mind, despite the fact I couldn't see him, but then someone streamed it live! I got a few chuckles and was amazed at how this new phenomenon was happening. It wasn't just people tweeting about live shit on TV, or some lame crap like that, nor a stadium of tweeters, it was a conference type room with a bunch of intelligent people meeting to learn, and a majority of them were all feeling the same things and the ability to share it quietly with others there.

Akin to passing notes in class, people would discuss how they'd love to leave, but opposed to notes, anyone in the world could read them! The talk started to pick up more and more, and then the bigwigs noticed, showed up and left comments about lynch mobs and how social media doesn't give us the right to heckle others, blah blah, but all in all if someone wants to put themselves out there, they have to be prepared for the consequences, if it wasn't on twitter, it would have been on everyone's blogs the next day anyways!

I did find a follow up blog here, and it actually mentions something I did to have fun after seeing the following tweet:
I saw this and thought damn, wouldn't this be a fun real time social experiment! I rushed to the nearest website I could remember, cafepress.com, made a store, and booted up paint.NET and make a picture, uploaded it onto a shirt, and put it on sale!


The ability to add to a real time joke from thousands of miles away intrigued me! I was watching the fun anyways, so why not try and participate and see what happens?

I was initially scared people would think I'm some sort of scammer/spammer/opportunist, but I wasn't doing this trying to sell shirts, I just wanted to see some people laugh, and show the power of how quickly some joke of a Keynote at a Higher Education Web conference can turn into a global joke where people can already buy merchandise world wide!

I shared the link with bitly, and you can actually see the stats by going here.
The stats are as follows:
187 Total clicks (at time of writing, 170 were on first day)
8 Tweets (2 were from me, and no one actually retweeted me, but made their own tweets linking to the shirt)
and about 150 of those tweets were in the first hour, and 75ish in the first 5 minutes form what I remember!

Anyways, it was pretty fun to add to something from miles away with only about 5 minutes of input, and it's also pretty cool to see quickly rising click counts in seconds and minutes!

The blog I linked to above had a lot of good points and things learned from the conference. I also like that the comments were all pretty smart, well read, and not the general crap you usually see. I lol at the anonymous comment saying how it was bad, and people were mean and idiots and he's glad to be home, I wonder who wrote that? haha!

Zappos DOES NOT EQUAL A Good Example of Customer Service in Social Media

You know, I'm sick and tired of constantly seeing posts about how Zappos is equivalent to great customer service! It seems like it's the only example out there for social media, but I know it's not!

Zappos sure as hell wasn't great for me in terms of Customer Experience; in fact, I do believe that my experience was far much worse than it would have been if I had never know that they were supposed to be synonymous with customer service!

Several months back I was looking for new shoes and I said hey what the hell, the local FootLocker sucks and seems to be staffed by inept kids that leave you waiting for 25 minutes listening to the worst goddamn mutherfucking music ever made while they try to find if your shoes are at another store or when they'll be in stock. It was so aggravating I said to myself, there has to be an easier way to get my shoes, I know exactly what I want, I get the same pair over and over because they are great!

I check out this Zappos thing people are wild about, although I have no idea how online shoes can be that exciting, at least if you are a guy. I check their site, it seemed nice enough, finding my shoes wasn't tough, and hey they were a good price with free shipping and free returns! Wow, these guys are good I thought, so I go to try to buy, but sorry I live in that far off mystical land of Canada that doesn't exist in the same universe as America, let alone the same continent. I'm pissed and yell FAIL. So I look for an alternative, perhaps they have a Canadian site? If they are so great they must!

Lo and Behold! They do! But hey, is this even the same company? The site looks completely different, like it's made from crap and aimed at people who aren't as important or who don't care about looks for functionality like Americans do. Funny how most sites seem to think that when they expand to Canada...

So I look for my shoes, and boy was that fun. 10 minutes later and after looking through every pair of shoes, I couldn't find my basic pair of New Balance running shoes! And WTF is this? $10 to ship on more expensive shoes then they'd be in the states? and $15 return? It even says they are shipping them from the US!!! If that is the case, why don't they just let me use their beautiful site that is fully stocked and pay for the shipping? Why do I have to pick from a lesser more expensive group and still have to pay for shipping? What kind of Bullshit are they running?!

So Anyways, I complain over Twitter making sure to mention Zappos and showing that I was unhappy (I even used a frowny!), and of course I've heard that over 200 of their employees are monitoring twitter. I expected someone to swoop down to my rescue any minute, or to at least appologize for lack of international service.

Several months later I still haven't heard a peep from them. Good customer service my fucking ass! Maybe if I was born under the American Flag I would have gotten some reception, but for a company that is synonymous with social media and great customer service, at least one fucking person could have said "Sorry, we're still working on our Canadian store", or "how can I help you pay us?". Seriously, WTF, high expectations, incredibly low results, seems pretty sad to me, and not even a reply from a Canadian Zappos employee, if they actually have any, or anyone in Canada. Perhaps I only had one tweet, but with the tools available at the time and 200 employees, someone must have saw my tweet.

I'll never use them as an example of Good customer service, just as one that is bad. Are they good because they offer free shipping and returns? Maybe that's it? Well so does well.ca and I know they are nice people who respond to you on twitter! Perhaps it's their culture? What fucking good does their culture do me if they don't help me (200 employees not helping me)? I really hate to say it, but at this point I believe Rogers (...shudder) does a better job of customer service using Social Media. Take that!

Anyways, I've been meaning to get this rant out for a long time, but seeing a recent tweet about zappos = customer service just got me riled up again.

RSS is not dead! It works great with Twitter!

People keep saying that RSS is dead, but I don't believe it, in fact I've never used RSS more than I do now! I found that I started using RSS after I started getting into Twitter. Perhaps that has to do with me having a job in Social Media and using that as an excuse to start using these tools, but suffice to say, I believe that I would miss a lot of information if I didn't use my RSS reader in conjunction with Twitter.

I would consider myself a Twitter power user, with the exception of having it mobile (I'm too cheap, and I'm never far from a computer). I follow a lot of people I deem important who are constantly shooting out valuable blog posts, and it gets to the point where my Firefox grows to 26 tabs open to catch up with all the links I missed before opening Twitter at work. I'm constantly opening bit.lys to get to new blog posts, links, articles, but I do know that if it's something they thought was important enough to write their own blog post about, I won't miss it. I can sometime skip over posts and just check my RSS reader later to catch up on what was said on my own time, without chancing either losing the tab, or forgetting about the link posted in real time.

My RSS is like a backup net, it lets me take some of the real time out of twitter and focus on the things that aren't as potentially important, like the interesting links and articles, as well as conversations. As I start to learn about more interesting people on Twitter, I can keep adding them to my feed reader. Thanks to PostRank I can also filter the crap!

Realtime is only good if you are there all the time, and while I try to be, sometimes I'm just too busy and when I do try to catch up, I get a million links to read at once. I usually try to leave the tabs on FF open to read later, but eventually it starts to slow everything down on my computer.

RSS is a great way to store articles for reading later, especially when some people blog about the important articles I may have missed!

The Follow Friday Legacy and Will Smith

Follow Friday, or #FF, is a curious thing I've come to discover. It's a ritual, well, it's almost a responsibility we have. A responsibility to our favourite people, or to those that we respect. We do it each Friday, over and over, usually the same messages, and all the same people RT you, then some spambots RT them. My #FF list keeps growing, I have about 12 tweets worth of people now, and recently I started hearing negativity that I was spamming the airways, dumping everyone I follow out there. Well I follow about 1333 people, and don't tweet that many, just those who've made the effort to interact with me, or who are very interesting.

I've told everyone that I will space out my #FF tweets from now on, to not spam out any users who still use the website or who don't have that many friends. It got me thinking today, as the same pattern repeats, that this is just like out of the Will Smith movie I Am Legend.

Every day he would go out to the docks and broadcast his pleas, his hopes, his offerings, like a lighthouse to ships sailing nearby. It's like a radio broadcast that never shuts down, but just repeats. We don't have to keep doing it, those who follow us already know, in fact most of the community already knows, they've been seeing it for some time now, so why do we continue?

Because like those beacons that repeat, we stand as a sign to newcomers, a direction that they can follow...Literally. Those who sail into our waters will not get lost, they will not crash on the rocks, they will find safe port and the shelter of a community. Twitter is built in such a way that these beacons are necessary as the stream keeps flowing, and if we don't retransmit, our messages will be carried off with the tide and into obscurity. We can never predict when new people will come and join us, so we carry on in a tried tradition, a right of passage to grant opportunity to those looking to join the tribe, knowing that one day they can pass this legacy onto those who were just like them, lost in this new turbulent ocean.

When the Robot Revolution Comes...They'll be more energy efficient!

Apps like this (Nike+ Running) make me laugh, but they make me kind of scared. If you think about the possibilities, you are broadcasting your physical limits to all potential enemies! If you had any fat stalkers, they know just how hard they'd have to train to take you down! And what about the robots?



Picture this, the future, robots hunt us, and now thanks to twitter they can calculate the speed and distance that can be covered by tech savvy nike+ running twitter enthusiasts. They can use their advanced AIs to hunt us down and project more accurate trajectories for their spear guns, nets, and lasers/bullets. They can become more fuel efficient understanding our limits and knowing when to strike, versus when to wear us down. They can accurately predict where we will be based on our smartphone GPS systems and understand where we will be before we even get there! At least these efficiencies will preserve fuels and make our Earth a healthier place?

I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of a quote from HK-47, the assassin droid in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (a great game by the way):

"Definition: 'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope. Statement: This definition, I am told, is subject to interpretation. Obviously, love is a matter of odds. Not many meatbags could make such a shot, and fewer would derive love from it. Yet for me, love is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticle, and together, achieving a singular purpose, against statistically long odds."