I asked the following question on twitter yesterday: “When you type something in all caps (either a word or phrase) do you hold shift or press caps lock?”
This came up in a conversation that I had with a friend in which we both agreed that we never use [Caps Lock].
Here are some of the responses I got:
@ernie
@niczak shift for two words or less, caps for longer . . .
@gcrush
@niczak i like caps lock 
@craigverse
@niczak Hmm, I should try that. TRIES IT! I must usually hold shift.
@tyf
@niczak I hold down shift.. quite pathetic for a DBA (when caps are so necessary.. I don’t even to UPPER())
@elainevdw
@niczak Shift, unless it’s on my phone, then I use my phone’s version of caps lock.
@geekandahalf
@niczak Both. Depends on the word I’m writing. My left pinky is FIERCE at holding down the shift key. It might be bigger than my rt. pinky.
@rdana
@niczak for ALL CAPS I press shift ALL THE WAY
I love some of those replies and very much to my surprise there are more people out there using the great old shift key than I imagined.
- Nicholas
Today when I went to get my coffee, I walked into a conversation between the two baristas who were discussing how much they hate Twitter. One of them knew I was a huge twitterer, and so they brought the conversation to me and wanted me to accept that Twitter was going to destroy the fabric of society as we know it.
People who get Twitter love it, and those that don’t get it, figure that people who twitter are morons. Such is how our society breaks things down I suppose. While Twitter has certainly found itself squarely in the mainstream, I think that it hasn’t really been able to accurately describe to people what it is, and I think a large reason for that is that people use it differently. Some use it as a marketing tool - we call them spammers, others use it to make friends and connections and to learn, some people use it detail the minutia of their lives - we call them annoying.
A side effect of a successful site like Twitter, are sites devoted to making Twitter more interesting. Sites like Tweeteffect.com will tell you how your tweets effect your followers, and whether people are following or unfollowing you based on what you tweet. Twitpic.com allows you to post a picture with your tweet, which will add flavor to your daily posts. Twitterfeed.com allows you to plug your blog postings on your twitter feed, for instance, about 10 minutes after I post this, it will appear in my feed automatically. The question becomes, how do I determine who I want to follow, and how can I know what they use twitter for, and will I enjoy following their tweets?
Today we ran across a newer site today called Mr.Tweet [ mrtweet.net ], which I think will help answer these questions. This site is particularly interesting since it not only gives you an idea of how you use twitter, but also how the people you follow use it. It will also spend a few days analyzing your tweets, your feed, and your followers feeds and give you some pretty good recommendations about who you should follow. It gave us a interesting picture about how us three geeks use Twitter. For instance, first look at Nicholas [ twitter.com/niczak ].
Nicholas is a single dad, who works in a full-time job in Reno Nevada. His tweets will reflect two main locations, His office, and his home. He also helps his young son manage his own twitter account. He is however, very conversational for someone who is actually doing work, since he uses an app called tweetdeck, and he is able to monitor twitter throughout the day and remain involved. His stats look like this :
Next we can take a look at my stats [ twitter.com/darthweef ]. I am a married business owner, who works from my house and doesn’t answer to anyone through out the day on how I spend my time. So I can occasionally get caught up in Twitter with out it doing any damage to my career. I also have a little more freedom to be out and about during the day, and so my tweets will reflect happenings at home, at the local coffee shop, or wherever I happen to be. I also do quite a bit of twitpic’ing since my iPhone / twitterfon make it very convienient. Since I get a little more caught up in twitter at times, my conversational aspect is way high, but I tend to stay in my 3 or 4 groups of people that I follow so my connections are lower. Here are my stats :
Our other Geek is Allen [ twitter.com/allen099 ]
Allen, is what I would label a mobile twitterer. He is “professional traveler” right now, and rarely sitting at a computer, and most of his tweets go to and from his blackberry. Being in NY, he is out wandering the city alot, and so he has a little more time to be interactive, with his followers, and to discuss more of the world around him. His stats are unavailable since he has yet to register on Mr. Tweet, but hopefully I can update this post in a few days with his info.
Now that I have found Mr. Tweet, I will certainly be running people that I want to follow through it to see how active, conversational and useful they are on twitter. People who don’t converse much are not worht following in my book, unless they are providing a informational service of some sort. People who only post 1 tweet a week, or so, are also not worth following since the odds are I will never really see, or interact with them. People who are not likely to follow me back are also not worth following since how can I interact with someone who is not taking the time to get to know who I am? Now, with Mr. Tweet, I have something to check that type of information and make an informed choice on who to follow before I invest a week into a person on twitter.
How do you use twitter? Let us know in the comments, and go ahead and follow us, we’re interesting ;).
Twitter is certainly popular. I can’t walk down the street without hearing a conversation about it. And if I do succeed in walking a full block without one mention of Twitter, my cell phone will almost certainly ring at least once because of some person’s tweet somewhere. I upgraded my text messaging plan to unlimited just to get tweets. Obsessive, no? I’ve kept up my end of the bargain, but what about Twitter?
We geeks, have been working on getting our act together and puttingmore and more content here on For The Love of Geeks, and you can certainly expect new content, a new look, and a new era of geek love swarming the interwebs from the hub here. More on that later.
All of us geeks, Nick, Allen, John, and Myself are twitter addicts, but now we will have a central place to twitter geek stuff from, as well as feed our blog posts too. So keep an eye on the For the Love of Geeks Twitter page : http://www.twitter.com/FtLoG.
Also, check our individual twitter pages for loads of laughs and info.
Stephen : twitter.com/darthweef
Nick : twitter.com/niczak
Allen : twitter.com/allen099
John : twitter.com/theREALdvorak
In no particular order :
1. [ Watchman ] movie will be pushed back and will end up being a Christmas blockbuster instead of the summer blockbuster starter they were hoping for. Thanks Fox for taking something beautiful and trying to crap all over it. Just one more, in a long list of reasons to despise you as a company.
2. Nothing excitingly new will come from this years, and Apple’s last, MacWorld. By the end of the year, Steve Jobs will have stepped down as CEO and will fill an emeritus roll of some sort.
3. [ Twitter ] will be overrun by malware, spam, and hackers making the service useless and a thing of the past. We have already seen the start of this, and unfortunately the twitter API is full of security holes, and the twitter dev seems to have reactionary view of security instead of a precautionary view. Since Twitter is finally starting to make it stamp in histories timeline of the internet, it will draw far too much exposure from unwanted forces.
4. Net Neutrality will finally get the political backing that it needs to become an actual reality, and yet somehow, the US gov’t will still think that they have the ability or the right to control content on the intertubes.
5. [ Wolverine ] will kick so much ass, that it will make us forget, at least for a little while, how pissed we are that [ Watchman ] still hasn’t been released.
Today MarsPhoenix (on Twitter) left us with a final message :
01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000
For those non-geeks out there, that is binary for “Triumph”. The mission was a triumph indeed and through social network sites like Twitter and Plurk, we got to follow the mission and bond emotionally with a lonely lander on a far away planet.
We learned much from our far away friend, and many of us are sad to see him go. For me Dr. Suess said it best :
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
On July 1st, I started an experiment to see how beneficial Plurk could be as a viral marketing avenue. The results were pretty interesting. Before I go into detail about it, I want to set the stage on what the expectations were, since we didn’t do any massive numbers.
For the Love of Geeks is a relativally new blog that I started back in January. It was initially designed to be my personal blog, but it quickly developed enough of a following that I thought I should at least start posting useful (at least I like to think they are useful) bits of information on geeky stuff that I like.
This blog generally receives about 10,000 - 15,000 page views a month, and I can generally count on each of my posts to get 2 or 3 diggs, and each post generally gets about 100 individual page views, and comments are a rarity.
On Plurk, I am not a major player. I have about 125 “friends” and 25 “fans” (or people that follow my plurks). Compared to people like Leo Laporte who have 1767 friends, and 1592 Fans, or Tony Hall, who has a whopping 2040 friends, you can see that my reach is much much more limited.
Even though I have a smaller number of people on Plurk, I was looking at it from the standpoint of the MLM pyramid aspect. My 100 friends have 100 friends who have 100 friends, etc. Could I get them to pass the along the link to thier friends and then in turn keep it going.
Another aspect of the experiment that is very important is that there was no real content being passed. It wasn’t some fascinating article solving all the problems in the world, or some new peice of tech that was previously unknown. It was a simple request to digg, comment, and pass on, and I let them know it was an experiment. That would also have tainted the results, but the goal was to see how deep we could go.
So here is a breakdown of what happened.
Within the first hour, there was 25 comments, and about 10 diggs. At this point, most the people coming were two deep. (meaning that a friend of mine had sent them there.)
Within 2 hours we were up to 50 comments, and were now about 4 deep. (me > my friend > thier friend > commenter)
By the end of the day 1. We got up to 75 Comments and were at about 40 or so diggs. At this point the post had been viewed several thousand times. The view count is a little skewed, since the post got stumbled and was linked to by a few other blogs and websites. So, the traffic count became little less important in our experiment.
At the end of day 2, we had 107 comments, and I “estimate” that we had gotten about 6 levels deep, and the tally of comments so far is 112, and surprisingly almost a week later, I still see traffic coming in from people on Plurk.
In the end, I have to declare this a win. It was really cool too see the frenzy this idea caused and how excited everyone was to be a part of it. I did see some people who made comments like :
“I clicked the link, but don’t want to share” or
“I don’t want to see this”
Also, I found it interesting that a large part of the plurk population is not a part of digg, or at least they didn’t want to digg the post if they were. I have found that people who are a part of one social network are generally a part of several others as well, so this surprised me a little.
It is important to note, that plurk doesn’t favor spammers, and if you post nothing but to this link plurks, they will likely be ignored. Also, when I have posted specific blog postings I can get a decent amount of traffic from my friends, but it doesn’t get passed around automatically.
People like Tony Hall have very low karma because I think people have stopped following his plurks since they didn’t really carry a social aspect to them. They were more of a marketing thrust, trying to get his masses to do something.
On the other hand, people like Tom Merritt, or Leo Laporte have the ability to post a request and have that go viral almost instantly, since they carry a bit of “internet celebrity” status, and they have friends who have more of a “follower” mentality then a friend one.
Ultimately, I think that Plurk definitely has the potential of being a very very important marketing tool, and I can totally see targetted advertising going in this direction soon. Other services, that are more entrenched, such as FriendFeed, or Twitter have a much larger capacity to go viral since the user base is much larger.
In the end, this was fun, and when I have more time, I am going to run a similar test through twitter, so stay tuned for that. 
If you have come here, and don’t follow me on Plurk, feel free to add me .. [ darthweef ]
If you have no idea what Plurk is, and want to have a little fun online, sign up - here is in an [ invite ]
Also, give me your thoughts on people using plurk as a marketing tool in the comments below.
The latest online craze is the social network, and Twitter is/was among the most popular of them all. Twitter, for those you living in caves, is an online micro-blogging social network application that allows users to blast 140 character messages to the world. You can follow other people’s “Tweets” and others can follow yours.
Recently, though, Twitter has become more famous for being unavailable then for the impact it has made on the social networking market. The “Fail Whale” is quickly becoming an internet celebrity, and if you go to Twitter you are more likely to see him, then your tweets.
Online “celebrities”, such as Leo Laporte, and Kevin Rose have made a game out of seeing how many followers they can get, and who will have the most. They are both well over 30,000 followers. Politicians, most prominently Barack Obama, have been using twitter to be “more in touch” with the younger constituents.
Twitter, although having no real monetization plans, seems to continue to be valued at higher and higher dollar amounts, allowing them to continually receive funding. In May, they received 15 milion dollars, based on a valuation of $80 million, and again just a few days ago, they received another round of funding. This time Twitter referred to itself as a communications utility, and Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions bought into it. No one is saying how much, but it appears that it was more then the last round.
So, with all this support, and all this money being thrown at Twitter, why do we see the whale every day. Just this morning I received the following messages via Plurk :
“Twitter is down again”
“Fail Whale for the Lose”
“Twitter = Epic Fail”
“I deleted my twitter account”
“I am so done with Twitter”
“Twitter is still down.. they might as well pull the plug and walk away.”
This is just this morning, and this is just from someone who has about 100 followers on Plurk. That is a small cross section of the real social networking scene.
So, can Twitter survive when it is quickly getting a reputation for being a failure? Will they be able to compete in a market that is quickly seeing better and more stable alternatives to Twitter?
While the twitter funding rolls in, the users are left to wonder what the money is being spent on. Surely not hardware since they have continued to have more outages in the month of June. Obviously not on staff members to improve scalability… since as I said, still having outages.
The Web 2.0 frontier is showing promise of being the dot com revolution that should have happened in the late 90’s, where internet companies are provided funding and actually make money, but when I see Twitter, I just seem to go back to the 90’s when people with good ideas got tons of money and then sat around wondering what they should do with it all…
For those of you tired of riding the Fail Whale, stop over to [ Plurk ] , it is more fun, more interactive, more stable, and simply more then Twitter.
Amazon.com has been inaccessible to many U.S. visitors since at least 10:30 a.m. PDT on Friday.
“Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to log on.
Rumors are flying as to what happened…
Did MediaDefender decide that Amazon was providing copyrighted material and DDoS the site, like they did Rev3 just a week ago?
Is Amazon stocking the online shelves with fresh 3G iPhones?
Has Twitter taken over amazon? Did the little birds that hold up the whale on twitter fly over and drop the whale on Amazon ?
Or is this just a site redesign gone bad? Whatever it is, it will me an economic downturn for Amazon, as even alittle downtime for that site means losses of large scale. Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average.
At least some Amazon sites outside the United States appear to be working such as China, the UK, France, and Germany.
The site’s front page has remained available using Amazon’s secure Web site address–https://www.amazon.com–but links on that page aren’t working.
The social networking side of the net has really be exploding lately. Web Apps like [ Twitter ], [ Facebook ], [ Pownce ], and even [ Digg ] have created an almost viral desire for people to stay connected on a real time basis.
When blogging began to be used on a personal level, it was a great way to find out what was happening in people’s lives on a daily / weekly basis and we saw a whole new medium of socal contact being born. Enter Twitter and now, instead of a daily mass of blog to read, you were able to get 140 character updates from people sent to your computer, or your phone… Life was good, albiet a little distracting.
Twitter, however, has now become more known for being unavailable, then it is for being a revolutionary way of communicating. While I think it is a little unfair, they are bringing that onto themselves since they can’t seem to keep the site up and running for more then a few hours at a time.
Enter [ Plurk ]. Yeah, I didn’t misspell that. Plurk is the newest addition to the “micro-blogging” world, and it is something else. The time line takes a little getting used to, but I think that was you do get used to it, it is much better for maintaining conversations, which is something always bothered me about twitter. I will get responses on twitter to something I said hours, even days, ago and have no idea what they are talking about. Whereas plurk keeps everything in a nice little box connected to your original statement.
Plurk is obviously a “Work in progress”, but is definitely enjoyable being a part of a new and fresh community, so I am happy to help them work out the bugs.
Plurk will have to start providing some external apps to allow you to break free from the browser, but I know that will be coming. They also need to provide a way to stop being updated on certain topics.. For instance, I am “friends” with Leo Laporte, meaning that I get his plurks, and he gets mine (along with several thousand other people ) and every time he says ANYTHING he get about 200 responses. Personally I am not interested in reading all the fan boy responses, so I would like the option of shutting that off .
All-in-all… plurk is very addicting, and I like the Karma aspect of it, makes plurking almost like a game where you earn points, and then get cooler stuff from the site.
I think that Plurk will need to pay close attention to the mistakes that Twitter has made, and correct them before they are made, since the overall feel of the plurking community is that they are shifting from Twitter to Plurk, and with heavy users like Leo Laporte, and the c|net crew making use of plurk, it has already starting to show sign of hiccuping…
So, come join me in the Social Networking world :
You can plurk me at [ Plurk ]
You can follow me on Twitter : [ Twitter ]
You can Pownce me at [ Pownce ]