The Internet

There is this big thing on Facebook about the lack of a dislike button. A countless number of groups have been set up protesting for the button to be introduced but Facebook has not yet taken note of this. Presumably the reason behind this is because they fear that the button my be used inappropriately in an offensive way and promote bullying, however there are also many situations where the like button can be used for this same purpose! In certain circumstances, a dislike button is the button that should be clicked. Look at this example that I mocked up:

If people want to be offensive and abusive to other people, they don’t need a Dislike button to do it! They will just write it in the comments so if this is the reason that a Dislike button does not exist then it is stupid!

Dislike buttons are also used widely on other websites but in a slightly different way; many forums will have a Karma system where you can like or dislike comments giving the comment an overall karma rating. An obvious example of somewhere that something like this is used is on YouTube:

I totally agree that the Dislike button should be introduced and believe it would be good for Facebook. If Facebook is not introducing the dislike button for another reason or you don’t agree with what I have said, please inform me in the comments!

The most common question I get asked by friends who are slowly coming round to using the micro-blogging service, Twitter, is “How do I get more followers?” When asked last week by @CiaraJudge I realised it was a lot of effort explaining my tips to everyone so then decided to create this blog post as  something I can just link to and send to those who ask me in the future and as a guide for those of you who might stumble upon it.

Here are the basic ways to get more follower with detailed descriptions explaing how each of them will help you gain twitter followers:

1. Sign up for Twitter
   This may seem very obvious and that is because it is, but if you dont have a twitter accont you cant get followers! If you are reading this I would presume you have twitter but if you dont this is my moment to inspire you to get twitter and here are my words of inspiration: “I use Twitter lol”
   Another reason I have mentioned signing up for twitter is because as soon as you sign up for twitter bots will find you and start adding you. Although these bots are not real people and will not interact with you, the do bump up your follower count and there is no complaining about that! However, a word of warning about these bots, you will get followed by a lot of spam accounts that follow you in the hop you will notice and look on their profiles, these profiles then link to pornography and other material you may not want to see!
2. Do not Protect your Tweets
   Although making your twitter account private will put you at a lower risk of receiving spam messages and keeps your info private, you wont gain any followers by doing that. By making your profile private it limits some of the methods that are listed below for gaining followers and will not help if you aspire to have a huge following.
3. Tweet
   This has got to be the most simple and easy way of gaining followers. It is as simple as just tweeting. However, most people will not understand how tweeting could increase your following. There are a lot of people (as well as bots) on twitter that will spend their time in the search, looking for other users who tweet about their interests. The more you tweet the more chance you have of a person or bot following you. Another thing about your tweets is that you should be broad and not just tweet about one topic; by tweeting about many topics it makes your twitter account available to a wider audience! It really is that simple. In my time on twitter I have notice an approximate, 1:20 follower:updates ratio, however this will not be precise, and will vary!
   This is one of the steps that wont make any difference if you have a private account; if you account is private, people cannot find your tweets in the public time line when searching!
4. Find/Follow Friends
   If you find people you know in real life on twitter, it is very likely they will follow you back. That is a fairly quick and simple way of getting followers. There are many ways to find people you know on twitter:
   • Search for User’s by name on the Find on Twitter page
   • Search for User’s who you have in your email on the Find on other networks page
   • Find users who have lists of users who you know (i.e. A list that has been made for your school or place of work – if such exists, ensure that you are on the list as this will increase your publicity to other twitterers)
   • Try asking people you have already found on twitter, which other mutual friends have twitter
5. Find/Follow twitterers of interest to you
   Using the the Find on Twitter page, find people/companies which you know and use and would be interested in the tweets of. A lot of twitter accounts have forms of auto-follow which will automatically follow those who start following it. When you follow those accounts your following will obviously rise. It will also make you more exposed to twitter bots who might crawl the follower of popular people to find more people to follow themselves thus increasing your following. Following more people may also help with some of the other steps that I recommend.
6. Invite Friends
   Inviting friends to twitter is a great way of helping the twitter community grow and it will also gain you more followers! If you invite someone to twitter they should follow you back and this will increase your following.
7. Reply to those you follow
   By replying to people you follow, they may see your tweet and start a conversation with you. From this point you should try and find common interest so that the person you are talking to think it would be a good idea to follow you.
   Doing this will also increase your tweet count and help in the same way that Tweeting helps. It will also allow people searching for people who send messages to that user to find you.
8. ReTweet those you follow
   ReTweeting is not the most effective way of getting follower but it can help and depending on which type of RT you use, will affect how it will help you:
   • New Style RTing: This is when you use the ReTweet button on twitter and it displays you ReTweet to your followers as if they were following the original poster.
     By using this style of RTing, other users will be able to find and follow your account if they click to see who has been ReTweeting a certain post. It is rare that another user will do this (hence why this may not be the most effective way of getting followers) however if a user wanted to find other tweeters who liked (and ReTweeted) the same post as them they may click this and follow you.
   • Classic RTing: This is when you copy the tweet and appending the suffix “RT @username:” replacing @username with the original poster.
     For the purpose of gaining followers this method would be more effect as it will be counted as a tweet on your account and will make it available in search allowing users to find you in the same way discussed in tip 4.
9. Search on Twitter
   In the same way that I said people will search for tweet matching their intrest, you can do the same. By searching a particular term that interests you, you can find other people to start conversations with and to follow. This will often result in the other user following you back. A good example of something to search for would be musical artists that you may like, you are very likely to find other people on Twitter who like the same artist that you can talk to.
10. Use Hashtags & Trending Topics
    Be using Trending Topics or popular hashtags you can increase the chance of your tweet being found when other user search. Trending topics and popular hashtags will be searched more often than just general terms. If you use of the hashtag or trending topic catches the attention of one of the people searching it, then they may reply, opening the opportunity to gain a new follower.
    UPDATE: If you are wondering what a Popular hashtag might include, it would include hashtags like #FollowFriday, #MusicMonday, #iwish, #nowplaying, # and #fail. You might also be able to find inspiration from What the Hashtag?!

I may elaborate on this in the future as I did rush this post towards the end but for now, those are a few quick steps to getting more followers

Have you noticed recently that on the odd page load, twitter might look a bit strange? I managed to capture one screenshot… let’s see if you can spot what has happened? The bug is subtle but many have noticed it while using twitter as I have seen other people tweeting about it.

You should be able to spot it as it appears on every tweet shown but let me get rid of all but one to make it a bit easier if you are still struggling and to make it EVEN easier I will put it side by side with what the tweet should look like. How about now:

If you still have not spotted it then (no offence) but you must be blind lol! Let me make it VERY obvious!

Yes that is right! Twitter is implementing Italian as one of their next languages! This is a major step for twitter as it will now mean that people living in Europe will soon get twitter in their local language and mean that the use of twitter within Europe will therefore grow! Had I actually done my research before posting this I would have know that twitter have launched Twitter in Italian, Spanish and French! But this was a glitch that I spotted And there was me thinking twitter we secretly testing Italian and had a glitch every now and then that sent it to everyone!

I just did a random search on Google (can’t remember what for) and discovered a nifty new feature! If you search for the user name of someone on twitter on Google, then Google will recognise this and automatically add a box at the top for a select few of the user’s most recent tweets of that user. Here is a screenshot of when you search for flungo on Google:

As you can see it will only show two updates and these updates may not necessarily be the 2 most recent. After being amazed by just the fact tweet were appearing on twitter, I noticed that there was a link that said, “Pause” and to me this implied that search was live! I tried testing this by making some for some reason (which I am yet to discover – if you know please comment) some of my tweets were omitted even after refreshing and these tweets never appeared on this page; Google must be using some sort of filtering to try and offer the most reliable tweets.

Rather than messily extending down the page (which would be inconvenient for those who don’t wish to use this feature) when the page starts to load more tweets and updates, Google shows them but limits the size of the area, and adds a nice little scroll bar if it exceeds that area. An example of this is bellow when @MOn321 sent me a tweet.

Even though not all tweets are show, you can view more tweets by clicking, “Latest updates for…”. By clicking this you will get a live search page that searches for you query:

This view will display any tweets that contain your query. This view is accessible from any search (even if Google does not automatically show the updates on your main search) by clicking, “Show options…” at the top of the search then selecting “Updates” from the list of search types.

I then decided to search for something that may find a few more results so I did a search for something that has been in the news for quite a while, “Tiger Woods“. Although the Latest Results did not appear at the top of the page it did appear but further down the page. It must use a similar ranking system to when positioning result in accordance to relevance. When I scrolled down, I instantly notice that the update was definitely live with updates coming in every few seconds and that this feature was not just limited Twitter; news sites and other sites that constantly have updates posted at a very fast rate were also being loaded in real time!

To just see the sheer number of tweets that it could build up I left the page searching for “Tiger Woods” for a little while (it ended up being approximately 15 minutes). Google ended up finding so many results that the screenshot is almost 6000 pixels long. For this reason, I am displaying just a thumbnail of the photo on the right however you can click to vie the whole picture

Overall this looks like a very powerful tool and a step in the correct direction for real-time search for one of the world largest search engines!

Yes that is right, I have 10 Google Wave invites to give away but to get your invite you must decipher the code bellow and follow the simple instructions:

I hope you enjoy this little challenge I have set you! Pleas share the challenge with friends and have fun solving it! If you recognise the encryption this should not take more than 5 minutes to solve!

Winner 1: And the first winner was….. @andy4321! Congratulations to him for decrypting the puzzle!

I regularly view a title=”TweetStats :: for flungo” href=”http://tweetstats.com/graphs/flungo” target=”_blank”>my TweetStats which clearly show a twitter addiction if you analyse them! However last night when I was checking my FollowCost I saw something that has definetly confirmed my twitter addiction! Look at the statistics for my last 100 tweets :S

Almost 40,000 milliscobles which is 40 times more tweets than @Scobleizer

To view all my stats have a look at:

• My TweetStats
• My FollowCost
• Me on TwitterCounter
• Me on Twitterholic
• Me on Twitter Analyzer

Is anybody else getting a load of spam today about some porn? I keep getting this message on twitter:

“@flungo Britney Fucked By A Big Dick, Come See Celeb XXX Videos (Click the link at top right of my profile)”

They are all from different users so just blocking doesn’t work. They must all be coming from the same IP address so surely twitter can block that IP and have rid of this annoying spam?

If not then I have thought of a cleaver idea to stop this. All of the spam uses the same profile picture so using PHP tools it would be possible to check the users image to see if it matches the spammers. I know it is possible but to actually code this I would have to do some research as I am no PHP expert.

However the major flaw with this is that it will take a lot of processing power to monitor every account’s new profile picture using this method. Could Twitter please do something about this? Spam is really the only annoying thing about twitter!

This is a quick little blog post to explain  the basics of Twitter lists. Twitter lists are a new feature from twitter that allows you to organise twitter accounts and create customised timelines. Any user will be able to create a list (when  it is fully distributed and out of BETA) can create or follow a list. Lists will be hosted under the creators twitter account (for example, if I was to create a list called “My Twitter Accounts” it would be found at @flungo/my-twitter-accounts) and is accessible to anyone with the lists feature everybody. I have tested this and you can link to lists directly from tweets and

Twitter lists are simple to create

The main advantage of lists that I can think of are that:

• It can make it easy for new users to twitter to easily start using the service and finding users that fit into categories they are interested in
• Users can organise followers
• Users can clear their main timeline from tweeters that they may deem less important
• Non-registered users can find lists they like and view them without having to sign-up to twitter (but why wouldn’t you want to sign-up?)

I have had this blog post ready almost since the day I got Google Wave however the Google Wave Embed API used to crash a lot so I never posted it! It seems stable enough now so here it is:

For all you people out there who are not as privileged as I and do not have a Google Wave account, I have embedded the welcome message for you to read and watch the video in. Just so that all you people without Google Wave feel just a little bit more jealous and envious of me and so that your yearning to get a Google Wave Account increases to a level which you will not be able to contain!

Incase the links dont work this is the wave for “Getting started with Google Wave”

And this is for “When to use Google Wave”

Finally for “Google Wave extensions”

A little bit late but all my blog posts are late at the moment! Since this is late I will make this post about twitter lists as quick as I can! If you have not seen this new feature on twitter, a list is basically a group which you can make with a bunch of people in it and it will create another timeline for all these people. Other people can then follow these lists and you can follow other people’s lists but what is the point in lists and what can you use them for?

For the person making the list there are 2 main purposes (that I can see):

• Organisation – You can organise the people you follow on twitter into groups so that it is easy to keep up to date with certain things. You may already use grouping methods in other applications and this is a brilliant way for doing the same but through the twitter website. This can also be handy when needing to find people in a certian group or when you only want to know what your friend are up to.
• Keeping your timeline clean – I don’t know about you but I am following a lot of rubbish on twitter and it takes up so many of my API calls in applications like @TweetDeck or @PocketTwit, therefore limiting the amount of useful tweets I can see and wasting my time by making me have to skip all of the useless tweets. By using lists you can move anyone that your following into a list, then view them only when you want to. This will clean up the timeline and make it more relevant! I will definitely be doing this for all the twitter games that I am following as they tend to clog allot of my timeline for no reason; when they are in a list I can view the games when I feel like joining in!

For someone who follows twitter lists:

• Easy updates – Say for example you liked the news, but you didn’t want to go round following every news twitter user; using lists you could find someone who has compiled a good list of news lists and then follow that. If the creator of the list maintains it then it will also mean that you don’t need to search for more twitter users in the categories you are following lists for.
• Topic based lists – If you like a specific topic, you will be able to find the perfect list for this. Another person interested in the same things may have already made a list of Twitter users related to that interest and finding a relevant list will save you time; rather than looking for every twitter user related to a topic you like you simply find the list and if it is updated you will always be getting the latest tweets from the latest twitter users in the areas you are interested in!
• Find Twitter users – By finding relevant lists, you do not have to follow them  but you could look at who is followed in the list and pick and chose the ones you like helping you find new and interesting people to follow.

For someone on a twitter list:

• Wider exposure – Get your twitter viewed by more people as people view lists that include you. Even if the you are not followed due to a list, if you are followed by a list that is widely followed you will get your tweets read by many people!

I wrote this very quickly and the time where I am is 00:36am, I may improve this tomorrow

UPDATE: I have added a little bit to this post but not that much….