WebRev Blog

You may have recently received the newest Twitter layout, which I wrote about last month.  If you haven't noticed a change yet, be patient.  About two-thirds of the accounts I manage have it, and the others don't  yet.  Unlike the last update, there doesn't seem to be a way to manually upgrade to the new look.

Well if you have that new layout, you'll find that some of your favorite brands may have an expanded version of that look. 

Above is an example of how the expanded page for Staples looks.  Of course they've customized their background - anyone can do that - even without an easy button. They now have a banner add that runs horizontally across the top of the page, and there is expanded space for a description.  There is also a space for a featured tweet, which can be a video, photo, or advertisement of some sort. 

Through this, has Twitter actually found a way to finance its operations without venture capital - premium layout pages?  I hope so.  For more information about brand pages, and to see if this may eventually be a good option for your business, see the Twitter Advertising Blog.

Twitter, the social network that has been the hero website of several international revolutions recently picked a REALLY bad week to clarify its policy on international censorship.

The online community was just beginning to settle down a bit from the SOPA / PIPA boycott, in which many large websites "went dark" for a day to protest government censorship of the web, when Twitter decided to announce that it could now censor Tweets by country, and the world screamed "WHAT?!"

Deep breaths, everyone.  Deep breaths.  This isn't what it sounds like.

Twitter is an international website (as are most websites, now), and as such is required to obey the laws of the countries in which it operates.  If a foreign government orders a take-down of certain content (e.g. for copyright violations, decency laws, etc.), then Twitter has no choice, really, but to comply.   It doesn't matter what the company believes about free speech in a case like that. 

Twitter was simply letting users know that in the past when this happened, it had to take down the content globally.  That meant that if the land of Genovia deemed all Tweets about Anne Hathaway to be illegal and demanded that Twitter remove them (that's a Princess Diaries joke), Twitter would have to take those tweets down, and NO ONE would be able to see them.  Now, Twitter's technology has been upgraded to allow a country-specific take-down, so that if such a demand were to be received, those tweets would simply be blocked in Genovia.  The rest of the world would still be able to see them and protest the take-down.  Because you know we would have a lively #FreeAnneHathaway hashtag feed going in about half a minute, as well as #BoycottGenovia. Because that how we roll...er, Tweet.

Mashable has a great explanation of how the new policy might help those wishing to use the site for political and social activism - see Relax: Twitter's new Censorship Policy is Actually going to be Good for Activists, and see Twitter Adopts Country-Specific Censorship Regime - How will that Work? on BoingBoing.

So, the #TwitterBlackout campaign might have been a tad unnecessary.  Especially since the whole idea was to boycott Twitter, and it doesn't make much sense to stage a boycott on the website you're threatening to boycott.  ;-)

Happy Monday, everyone!

Conference and event attendees have been using the social media site, Twitter for several years to communicate at the event about changes in plans, room reservations, event promotions, jokes about speakers at the event, etc., through the use of #hashtags.  Usually, influential people at the event will begin to tweet each other prior to the event, and the hashtag will often develop organically, as more and more people start to use it to make sure other event attendees are able to see their "tweets."

For example, if we had a conference in 2012 called "Burgers and Fries," our #hashtag might be #baf12.  Everyone who posted a tweet that they wanted to communicate to crowd at the event would include that tag in their post.  All tweets on Twitter are public, so this would not be the place to communicate any sort of private information - but it's a great place to communicate public information.

Well, there are very few events bigger than a Super Bowl, and the folks that are hosting this year's national championship have collaborated with students from Ball State University to up a social media command center," to help those attending the game in person get where they're going and have a good time:

...About a dozen Ball State journalism, telecommunications and information and communication sciences students are participating in the effort to offer the online concierge service, helping visitors around Indianapolis in the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. Nearly half the collegians working at the center are from Ball State with two other local universities supplying student employees.

John Strauss, a journalism instructor overseeing the Ball State group, said the service will operate on official Super Bowl social media channels including its Twitter feed. The service is designed to respond to questions from the public as well as relay questions and developing issues to the host committee, law enforcement and other organizations....(more)

They're going to have their hands full.  RTV6 in Indiana reports that during last year's Super Bowl there were approximately 4,000 tweets per second. Whew! FastCompany has a great write-up about how social media is being incorporated into the bowl game celebrations HERE. 

If you would like to tweet during this year's Super Bowl, just sign into Twitter, and start by checking out #SBXLVI and #SuperBowl.  May the best team win!

I got a Twitter application update on my smart phone a few days ago for one of my accounts, and this morning I signed into that account on the website and found the update had also taken place there as well.  Except for the sidebar having been moved to the left, I really like the new look.  It's clean, crisp, and very user-friendly. 

My guess is that the sidebar was moved to the left to make ad-space more appealing to potential advertisers, but I do not have confirmation on that.

The update is being rolled out incrementally, so if your account doesn't have it yet, you can preview it at fly.twitter.com. As you can see, universal icons have taken precedence over the text for the pages and links - making the whole site much less busy, allowing the eye to focus on the Tweets.  There is also uniformity now between the website version of Twitter and the mobile version - which makes sense, because Twitter was developed primarily for mobile use.

Twitter has also ramped up the "networking" aspect of its social-networking site by making its suggestions for followers and topics much smarter in a "discover" field.  It has capitalized on the user-created and user-developed #hashtag phenomenon, and integrated an easy-to-use, more relevant search by stories, activity, who to follow, find friends, and browse categories, complete with user-posted video and photos.  It's quite brilliant.

Of all of the social networking site updates I've seen recently, this most recent one by Twitter is, in my opinion, the most innovative and helpful to the user base.  Now, we'll see if my guess is correct about the advertising. 

Since its inception, Twitter's format has been basically that of a long stream of seemingly random one-liners made by users.  As the users found ways to interact with each other, Twitter began integrating their makeshift "system" into its own official one, such as the "retweet," and the "reply."  Also, as users found ways to shorten their URLs to leave more space in their 140-character limit tweets, Twitter eventually began shortening the links automatically.

Well, without fanfare, Twitter is this week rolling out its most dramatic feature to-date - threaded "activity" streams.  If this feature has been made available on your account, you'll see it when you sign in, both under a tab called "activity" at the top of your home page, and under the "mentions" tab, which is the one that looks like @YourUsername.  TechCrunch has an example, and more information HERE.

In the new activity stream, you can quickly peruse who is now following whom (so you can more easily search for mutual contacts) and who has been replying or retweeting what since your last login.  The "threads" are only one level deep, unfortunately, so they still don't have a full "discussion" capacity, which is a feature that has been missing on Twitter from the beginning.  However the avoidance of long discussions and a format that just allows for quick updates is exactly the attraction for many users - particularly those wanting quick updates on a developing story. 

Under the "mentions" tab are the threads that I find the most useful.  It is now much easier to see what people are replying to when they mention you in a tweet.  It's easy to see in one place exactly who has begun following you.  From that one page you can click on that new follower's icon; his or her profile will pop up in the right column, and you can follow back, block, or do nothing right from that one screen.  Very convenient.  Oh, and if you really don't want the threaded stream, and prefer to revert to the older view, you can simply check "show mentions only" at the upper right of the stream.

I really believe that these new screens will soon be monetized by Twitter, as the company does not run ads, and is still relying on venture capital to continue its operations - a funding strategy that has its limits.  These alternate screens provide the opportunity to offer additional services and/or targeted ad space that could help Twitter eventually become profitable.  It remains to be seen, however, if this is their plan and if so, how they will go about it, exactly.

How do you like the new format?  Do you think you'll use the threaded options more, or just rely on Twitter's traditional "timeline"?

While English language purists undoubtedly cringe at some of the verbeage being created in the 21st century, it has become a fact of life that you can now "unfriend," and "unfollow" someone.  These are newly created verbs meaning to remove someone from your social networking profile list such as on Facebook or Twitter.

Knowing when to unfriend or unfollow someone is a valuable skill.  We've talked about how to do this on Facebook in discussions about controlling your news feeds.  Today. let's talk about some simple guidelines for Twitter.

As we discussed previously in Rookie Mistakes on Twitter, it's a good idea to keep your number of followers fairly close to the number of people you follow.  If you are following a lot more people than are following  you back, you'll appear to be a spammer.  Unless you are famous enough to pull of the "fan" following, most "Tweeps" will think you're snob if you don't bother to follow people back.  So achieving a balance of around 80-90% (or closer) on the ratio of followers to followee is desirable for most of us. There are a number of ways to do this.  

Some people on Twitter have a "follow back" policy, which they may or may not announce in their profile.  This means they don't screen the people who are following them - they just automatically follow everyone back.  This is a simple way of handling the followership balance, but if you do this you'll quickly find that you'll also need to take steps to filter your feed, or you'll have so much to read that your Twitter home page will become useless to you.

Another technique is to protect your tweets (in your settings) so that you must tive people permission to follow you.  This is a great way to manage your feed if it is mostly for personal communication with a small group of friends.  If you're using Twitter fo try to grow an online network, however, protecting your tweets from public view might be counter-productive.

The last technique is to actually spend the time necessary to review the people who are following you, block the spammers, follow the like-minded folks back, and just allow the others to follow you without following them back. This way is a little more time-consuming, but for most of us (who are not extremely famous), this is a manageable task if done regularly. 

One tool I like a lot that can help with this task is FriendorFollow.com.  This site has a free version, and does not require you to give your Twitter password (because it draws from publicly-available lists).  It will quickly filter your list for you., and let you know who you are following who is not (or no longer) following you back.  It also lets you know who your mutual friends are and who you are not following but these lists are easy to call up on the Twitter site itself.  The  list of who is not following you back is not available as a list on Twitter, however.  Premium members have more options, but those of us who have free memberships can then scan those profiles to see who we might want to continue following, and who we might want to unfollow.

Everyone will have different criteria for deciding who to unfollow.  I will usually continue to follow the leaders in my industry, who simply have too many followers to keep up with, and often are "famous" enough to carry a large following without having to follow back.  The information they provide in their tweets is actually useful to me, and I enjoy reading their updates.  A lot of the folks who are not following me back are no longer active on Twitter, so unfollowing them quickly brings my follower to followee ratio back to a reasonable level. 

What other criteria do use to decide who to follow and who to "unfollow" on social networking sites like Twitter?