Twitter Spam, is it really an issue?

Posted on January 28, 2009

Andrew Hyde posted “A Message to Twitter Spammers” suggesting that something needed to be done, but does it really? In my comments to his post I asked if it was really necessary for Twitter to go that far, and weather it was really a problem at all. 

I’m not sure they need to go so far as to ban users that do it. As twitter grows communities are going to form around the speakers that have the most to offer. If the people mass following then unfollowing have nothing to say eventually their followers are going to move on.

The problem I have with wanting Twitter to do something about this is that it seems to me to be an argument by people who feel like they’ve earned their following against people they feel haven’t. An argument you could interpret at elitst and at it’s most base level it’s just users upset that they’re now having to deal with their 

Now I’m not suggesting for a second that Andrew Hyde or anyone else is churlish, childish or elitist. I wouldn’t follow him either on Twitter or his blog if I though so. I think it’s far more likely that most users are just seeing an increase in people following them as Twitter becomes more and more mainstream. They’re also seeing a lot of followers who are plainly gaming the system to inflate their perceived influence; dealing with that on a daily basis is frustrating , I’m sure.

In my comment I tried to make the point that all these users were gaining a thin perception that at a glance they matter. But that I don’t think it makes any real difference and I don’t think it’s worth wasting time lobbying for change because these users really aren’t building a following at all. Despite what the numbers may indicate.

I don’t see an audience on twitter as being any different from an audience anywhere. Any idiot can get one, just walk into a crowded room and start shouting. Keeping them is what matters. An audience that isn’t engaged or doesn’t care, doesn’t matter.

I could show up in the houses of parliament and shout my message out at MPs, get on the news in the process and have it heard by hundreds, even thousands of people of influence – but they’d label my message the ravings of a lunatic and even if they were amused would quickly move on with their lives. 

Nothing twitter can do will stop the type of people that only care about the number of people listening to them from caring about that. What might be better is if tools like http://twitter.grader.com gave weight to the longevity of your engagement with a follower and took churn rates into account. These are in my mind more important numbers for the people that want to measure things to pay attention to. In my mind someone who is steadily gaining and keeping followers at the rate of one a day has a far more compelling message than someone getting a thousand and losing half within a week.

The solution is to focus on numbers that matter, if you’re going to focus on them at all, and the key to any social network or service is to care about how engaged your are with that network. High proportionate churn rates are a pretty clear indication that users are not engaged and if they’re not engaged, they’re not listening.

I’m not part of the twitter elite, my opinion doesn’t really matter. If someone follows me I tend to follow them back, but since I’m not a person of any great influence I probably don’t get quite the level of requests some do. I’m doing my best to follow people interesting and working in similar fields, to me some level of engagement with a hundred followers would be better than shouting at ten thousand. 

Started using the mechanical turk

Posted on January 27, 2009

We launched the crawler a while ago now and the results are impressive and even a little surprising in some respects, while in others they’re not. Basically we’re happy we found a few thousand pages with geotags on the first crawl though the longer we’ve let it go the lower the ratio gets. Totally expected because we seeded it with pages we knew were geotagged in the first place. 

To get more pages, we’ve started using the mechanical turk. We’re hoping to get pages that aren’t otherwise tagged added by real people. Once we launch this is obviously going to be a function of the site, something we want any user to be able to do. In the meantime I’m tweaking our turk jobs and starting to get some good data back, though not as much as we’d like – we’ll probably have to up the cost. 

I’ll let you know how it turns out, in the meantime if anyone has any experience with turk, any hints or thoughts – let me know. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Crawler
• Solve for Efficiency With Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Who’s inside that Mechanical Turk?

Local business advertising

Posted on January 15, 2009

A large part of the assumptions we’re making with goroam are based around the idea that local business wants to capitalise on the Internet to bring in business. But it’s not easy. How do promote a book store, toy shop, cafe or plumber in your local area online, now imagine you have a books and toys to sell, coffees and tea to make or houses without hot water to help – in short, a full time job that doesn’t leave much time for SEO, SEM, analytics and tweaking a website and search advertising strategy.   

We’re not just pulling the assumption out of thin air though- helping local business market online is big business, Yodle’s 700% growth last year and $10M C round is a great example of this trend and from the techcrunch article, they’re not the only ones in the game. 

Yodle competes against a number of similar, venture-backed companies such as ReachLocal(which raised a substantial $65 million in funding to date), MerchantCircle (which raised its $10 million in Series B funding round in November 2007), Ingenio (acquired by AT&T, also in November 2007), WebVisible (total funding: $17 million) and a plethora of smaller companies trying to get their piece of the pie.

So we’ve got the social proof, now we just have to capitalise on it and bring something to market that makes it easy for small businesses to target their services at the people in their area who are interested. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Study: Small businesses love Google, even when things go wrong
• Joe The Plumber’s Landing Page

Crawler

Posted on January 14, 2009

I’ve been a bit quiet lately, but not inactive. I’ve been working very hard on our location based service project- A better way to search and explore things around you.

Right now everything we’re doing is happening in the background, laying the ground work for the things to come. Background things like our crawler.

I finished the first milestone for our crawler a few days ago and set it loose on the internet. It’s been crawling from my laptop, then I moved it to our hosted server and let it do a few crawls from there.

After a few teething issues it’s finally managed to cross a bit of a milestone – 250,000 pages downloaded, approximately 3000 of them with geo tags have been indexed. I feel a bit like a proud parent, and have spent far too much time just watching the crawl take place.

What it’s looking for
First and probably most important is for any pages that have been geo tagged; second the structure and links to/from a page are being analysed to help create a picture of how important a page is both in an area and in general.

I’ll try and pop my head above the parapet here and on the goroam site more and more often as we get closer to a launch to try and fill in more of the blanks.

I see the point of git.

Posted on January 1, 2009

I’ve made some progress over the last few days getting things working towards getting the crawler online and came across a scenario where git would have been useful and had one of those epiphany movements when distributed development clicked and it made sense to me. 

The first run of our crawler is based on a pretty vanilla nutch install with some plugins; it works already and saves us an awful lot of leg work. The first thing I wanted to do was quickly mavenise it so we could better integrate it into our development environment. Problem is if I pull the trunk, I can’t commit and update from our own internal repository and the Apache one. 

I intend at some point, once it’s working and I’m happy with it, to submit a patch back to the ASF but in the short term I just want to share my fork with other developers on my team. This is where git would come in. Next I was hoping to start to move the configuration over to the springframework IOC controller, to see if/how it works or doesn’t, again I’d submit the patches if the community was interested. 

When I get a bit of time in the next few weeks I think I’ll install a central git repository for our dev environment and trial a transition there. Has anyone tried something similar, is git what I’m looking for?