AdamCovati.com

How Twitter can monetize it’s fast userbase has been a hot topic as of late. Recently @mike9r suggested that maybe twitter should allow people to pay for their service if they pleased. In return Twitter could allow them to have 240 chars instead of 140. An interesting idea.

And while I do agree the idea has merit, some might argue that it destroys something key to what makes twitter twitter. And I count myself in that camp.

Part of the value in twitter is that it’s quick. I’ve been annoyed more than once that I couldn’t get my thoughts into 140 chars. However, that limitation keeps you on target, it ensures that everything is bite-sized.

Increasing the character count could make it harder to quickly scan through tweets. My personal feeling is that this would just make twitter more distracting.

The other argument I made was that this could break many twitter clients. Mike argued that this was ok, essentially this was good for the market:

@covati It would kill a bunch of clients, but then again, why would Twitter care about that? 3rd party apps would race to make a new version

I argue that these clients and other third party are a huge part of what has made Twitter so successful. All these interesting integrations and efficiency tools have actually made twitter useable.

I personally find it daunting to try to interect with close to 400 people via the web interface. Tools like TweetDeck allow me to manage that massive flood of tweets. If the people who manage these tools have to deal with an ever changing and tool or API then they may become discouraged and stop maintaining them.

That’s my take, I love twitter, it’s a great tool. If they went with Mike’s suggestion I’m sure it would be fine. But for now, I say, stay with 140.

As I have mentioned before, I run idek.net, which is a url shortener. These are great for places where characters are at a premium. Some people have asked me how the url redirects work and how they affect SEO. This quick video gives a basic overview of 301 redirects which is what idek.net uses to get your from a short url to a long one.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owVh6PX9bw0[/video]

Other Resources:

• URL redirection on Wikipedia
• An example analytics page from idek.net

Yea, I love analogies. They are a great way to get your point across. I started using them heavily when I managed a small team of developers and had to settle a number of disputes between particularly stubborn developers.

Ever since then I’ve employed them quite often, when I can really. In terms of conversations, especially with complex ideas they are a must, here are a few reasons why:

1. Analogies simplify the problem
   In stead of worry about every little detail we can get down to the real nitty gritty of the problem. We are allowing for a distilling of the issue.
2. Analogies provide an alternative viewpoint
   An analogy allows you to present a different story, often from a different point of view, this can allow people to see another side more easily.
3. Analogies remove emotional investment
   Along the same lines as #2, when we are talking about something else entirely we remove the emotional investment some one may have in the original discussion point.
4. Analogies are a point of reference
   Often times the biggest reason to use an analogy is to show that this problem has already been argued or solved in a slightly different case.
5. Analogies often times provide new insights
   I’m often surprised by conclusions I draw from an analogy I created when I push the boundaries of the comparison.
6. They’re fun!
   I love a good analogy. They’re just fun to talk about, and you’ll be surprised how far you can push one if you try.

Analogies aren’t just powerhouses in conversations, they have a lot of value when trying to explain concepts in software as well. So whether I want to get some one on board to a new pricing paradigm, or I want to show a user how to use a new widget, I’m always trucking these bad boys out.

How do you use analogies?

I have been working on http://idek.net for a little while now (it’s a url shortener with great stats, useful for twitter). It’s something I’ve been doing on the side because I love to create apps. Like many friends I have who are programmers I have had many side projects that never made it. So why did idek.net get launched?

Well, the answer is easy, I aimed small. I took a good bit of one cloudy weekend and wrote a useable app and launched it. Once it was live I slowly started adding to it. It now has most of the features of the competitors, and a few more great ones planned.

I was able to gain momentum and keep it by not taking on any huge tasks that would get stuck in the mud.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Here’s some one who went into a bit more detail on why shooting for attainable goals builds momentum.

Of course, if I could follow that philosophy more closely then I’d probably post here more often!

Google has just launched SearchWiki within their search results. This toolset allows users to alter the results that they receive from google. They can move results up or down, add new results, or even remove them from the results. You can also add comments to search results.

Now, I should make it clear that this does not affect page rank, or even the results that other people see when doing searches. However, other people who are logged into google can see, via the SearchWiki icons, what users are doing with results. This allows the SearchWiki community to function much like reddit or Digg.

We’ve always said that the best search engine is the one that understands what the individual user wants … SearchWiki really puts that in action: this is an even deeper level of customisation than we’ve offered before, because people know best what search results they are looking for.

Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google

This is a great step forward for google. Rather than entirely trying to mathematically determine optimal search results they are actually able to incorporate opinions from people who are doing the searches. So while this won’t have an affect on most googlers, it does allow them to start to harness the massive community of people out there who want to work together to find better results.

I can only hope that this is a start of something that will provide more power to the social networks of users who are depending on google every day. Moving google a bit more towards the digg/reddit model could help to make results more relevant and also drive more involvement. Of course reddit and digg are also gameable, often times political or underhanded forces take advantage of this to bias results on the front pages of these site. Google is no where near prepared to give their rankings or results over to the mob. This method does seem like a safe way to allow those crowds to have their say without jeopardizing Google’s standing as the best way to search. Learn more about Google SearchWiki:

• Google SearchWiki tool allows user to personalise search
• Google’s Help topic on SearchWiki
• Google’s Blog: SearchWiki: Make Search Your Own

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.

I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.

As a follow up to my previous article, Howto Twitter, I’ve written up a bit about the mass of applications that are now available as supplements to Twitter.
Follow this link to see the article:

There are, of course, too many to mention them all, but I have selected a few that I find the most useful, even on a day-to-day basis. For anyone getting started in Twitter, this list will help bring you up to speed a bit faster. For those who twitter everyday you may learn something new, and if not, let me know which apps I left out which should be listed here.

Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a couple of videos giving first Britanny Spears, then Barack Obama a hard time for how they are managing their twitter accounts. As always Gary has some great points, this guy owns the social space.

I completely agree – if Barack or Britanny are trying to own the space.

But what if they are just trying to provide another avenue for info about what they are up to. Isn’t that was twitter was started for? “What are you doing?” is the question, right?

Everything has its purpose. I follow a few news feedcasting twitterers because I like to get the news updates sprinkled in there. I actually don’t want a relationship, just straight news. So sometimes, having that info in twitter form is useful.

Read on…

NB: I hope that this doesn’t lead to an uptick of this type of twitter spam. But I think educating the non-spammers is more important.

Ok, I thought I’d write a new bloggeries about using social engineering to game twitter. Let’s start to covering some basics that many of you know. The best people to follow on twitter often have more followers than those they are following.

It’s basic economics, unless you’re a superstar like @WayneSutton or @GaryVee, you just can’t handle all the noise it generates. Even though reciprocation is the nice thing to do, I can understand when a big name doesn’t follow me. This leads to easily identifiable patterns, spammers are often following 1000s of people and have followers numbering in the 10s or low 100s. When I get followed by one of these chaps I quickly block them. Update:@EmailKarma pointed out that I should just go with d spam @spammer.

Find out what the spammers are doing…

Good products serve a need and serve it well. A crucial piece of solving problems is good workflow. And to truly have good workflow you need to understand the entire environment people are experiencing during and around the time of the problem you are addressing.

Lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time trying to think through the workflow for idek.net as well as twitwit.us. These two sites integrate with other services, and as such, I need to consider where people will be and what they’ll be doing when the use these apps.

Why do you care? Well, you always need to remember to attack every problem from multiple angles, because your users aren’t just coming at it from one place. They may have different goals and different needs that you may not have considered.

Once you’ve gotten all the variables better understood you can try to devise a workflow and solution that will efficient and enjoyable for your users.