Since Twitter’s popularity is ever accelerating, resulting in it almost becoming a utility, not unlike email, I wanted to take a moment to lay out some details about how communication takes place using it. I still find many do not realize how @ replies work and as a result their tweets are not received by their intended audience.
The problem arises when a twitter user tweets about what another twitterer is doing, e.g., “@ted is kicking my ass in Wii Tennis.” Let’s say that @bill is the sender of this tweet. Let’s assume that both @bill and @ted have @sue as a follower. @sue will get the above tweet on her twitter stream, as intended. Let’s also assume that @betty follows @bill, but not @ted. Here is where things get dicey. @betty will not get this tweet on her twitter stream, even though she follows @bill who sent it! It will still appear on the public timeline. The problem is that Twitter assumes that all tweets that begin with @username are intended as a tweet directed at that user. In this case, Twitter assumes that @bill’s tweet above is being sent to @ted, when that is clearly not the intention. An additional unintended consequence is that this tweet will appear in @ted’s replies tab when @ted is logged into twitter through the web.
The lesson to be learned here is to never begin a tweet with a @user unless it is intended as a reply or tweet to that user.
How do we get around this such that we re-frame this tweet so its original intent is realized? Simply insert a word, character or space before the @user as appropriate, or, better yet, exercise those elementary school grammar muscles and rephrase the tweet altogether, e.g., “getting my ass kicked by @ted in Wii tennis.”
There is an exception to the behavior that I’ve outlined above. On your Settings page, there is a Notices tab. Contained within that tab is a section called “@ Replies.” The default setting (and recommended setting if you follow more than a few dozen people) is “@ replies to the people I’m following.” If you select the “all @ replies” setting, then you would get all @ messages from someone you follow even if you don’t follow the user to whom the tweet is addressed. If @betty above had this setting chosen in her settings, she would get @bill’s tweet above in the second paragraph. If @betty followed 400 people, however, and each person sent an average of only 3 tweets per day addressed to people @betty didn’t follow, she would get an additional 1,200 tweets per day! I personally wish Twitter would allow you to set the @ reply settings on a per followee basis. For example, if @betty followed @bill as above, and @bill was a very clever twitterer or A-list twitterati who communicated with followers that @betty would perhaps also be interested in following, then she could optionally select a custom @ reply setting for @bill such that she would see all his tweets, even if they were directed at people she didn’t follow. Likewise, she could decide that she doesn’t want to see @willy’s @ replies if they aren’t directed at her or people she follows.
I hope I’ve accomplished my mission of clearing up how @ replies work in Twitter, and more importantly, compel twitterers to stop starting tweets with @ if they aren’t directed at that person!
The following is a letter one of my friends and colleagues wrote to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison concerning the upcoming Senate vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. I have left it unedited, with the exception of replacing his underlines with italics for readability. I think he makes some excellent points here and I concur with his assessment, particularly the point about Houston (and Texas) constantly taking the easy road of eschewing change, resulting in the best minds, ideas and innovations going to the west coast. I am tired of the intellectually lazy, business-as-usual conservative politics here. Because of insipid, brainless dogma, we repeatedly squander every opportunity to do truly great, innovative things. Anyway, enough of my opinion. Enjoy!
To: Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison & John Cornyn
RE: Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act
The Senate is scheduled to debate and vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act the first week of June.
As a citizen of Texas, a technology entrepreneur, a co-founder of one of Houston’s first Internet service providers, a veteran of the armed forces, and a current real estate professional, I urge you to seize this historic opportunity and pass this bill.
Here are five compelling reasons to act now:
The political opportunity is ripe. 78% of Americans want Congress to act on global warming. We need to take advantage of the tremendous momentum that exists today.
Building a domestic renewable energy supply that weans us from a mostly foreign, Middle-Eastern oil supply should be a national security imperative.
Carbon emission caps also address a very important LOCAL concern in Houston – our notorious air toxicity and ozone (exacerbated by CO2 and other heat-rapping gases).
This isn’t an issue with whether or not you agree with global warming – this is an economic issue now of producing domestic, cleaner energy and spurring technology investment in Texas beyond oil and gas – gas prices are out of control and we need more choices for energy. However, every year we wait equals extra effort. If we delay this bill by just two years, we will have to make twice the annual cuts in carbon emissions to hit the same cumulative reductions by 2020.
Someone is going to win the global race to create competitive cleaner energy. Houston and Texas can benefit, with effective leadership, from this growing consensus. Renewable energy promises to become one of the world’s most profitable industries - Japan and Germany already are ahead of us. But advances in renewable energy technologies will not be fully realized without a national cap on global warming pollution – almost every clean-energy entrepreneur agrees with this statement that has been interviewed. Refuse to act and most of the entrepreneurship will go to Silicon Valley just like in 1995 when I was starting Houston’s first large Internet services provider. Please don’t become complicit in a technology brain-drain from Texas 10 years out.
The science is unforgiving. As the Earth warms, we approach a “tipping point,” after which large destructive climate changes become inevitable. This is a scientific consensus (like tobacco smoke causes lung cancer) – I am frankly not interested in whether or not policy analysts or members of Congress agree with this consensus or not, especially when it comes to my planet and health.
What legacy will the 110th Congress and you leave for Texas? When future generations look back at this moment, they will either praise you and the Senate for starting us down the path to solving the global warming crisis, or blame you and the Senate for squandering this opportunity. If you fail to vote, you stand to put us right back to the 1980’s in Texas while the rest of the nation moves ahead. You have an opportunity to make us a leader in the energy future of America, or to allow us to decline when oil production drops off. It will happen – history is famous for repetition.
Finally, have you read Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp? What amazes me as a business leader and entrepreneur is his complete embrace of markets - with smart and effective federal leadership - to solve the problem, based on case studies and diligent research. What are you doing to secure Texas in this new emerging energy markets? Please vote FOR the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act when it comes to a vote in June.
If you are not seeing updates for people you follow on twitter through the web or your favorite client (e.g., twhirl, etc.), you are not alone! Be sure to go to this page and report it! Furthermore, tell everyone to do the same if they’re also experiencing the same problem. Let’s see if we can get about 20,000+ people to get the attention of the twitter people and at least get an update to what’s going on!
(UPDATE)
It appears if you visit this page, they have acknowledged the problem (I presume it’s the same issue noted here from a month ago). See if having them clear your cache solves the problem. I have asked them to clear mine and will post the results here.
(UPDATE 2)
I got this tweet from @biz indicating they are working on the issue. Ironically the only way I got it is running tweetscan on my nick.
(UPDATE 3)
Yes, twitter is still broken. They haven’t cleared my cache or anything, so far as I can tell; I still only see a portion of my twitter stream. The problem seems to only affect the intersection of people with large amounts of followers with those who follow a decent amount of people. E.g., if you follow more than a few dozen people you won’t see tweets from the likes of @scobleizer, who has over 20,000 followers. Likewise, if you follow over 100 people, you won’t see tweets from people who have over 300 followers. I haven’t nailed it down precisely yet, but there is certainly a mathematical function to this. I hope they fix it soon! In the meantime, you can go surf each of your followees individual pages and/or subscribe to their tweets separately with an RSS reader.
I wish they would give us more technical details - there certainly is more tech knowhow on twitter they could tap into to fix the problem. I know they use Amazon S3 and perhaps EC2 for their infrastructure and some sort of caching mechanism (for performance and/or cost reasons?) that isn’t doing it’s job. Obviously writing a simple web app to do what twitter does would be fairly trivial to not have problems, at the expense of cpus, disk space and bandwidth; this leads me to believe they’re trying to be fancy, and it isn’t working so well. IMHO they should have a “brute force” fallback that would work 100% albeit not optimally until they sort it all out.
I’m usually very loathe to simply link out to another blog’s content, but I thought, with tax season upon us, this post was worth a mention. I think it’s a tremendous testament to social media when a company the size of H&R Block (and one that is in the tax business of all things) embraces social media to strengthen brand awareness. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I’ve pasted three paragraphs below from the story that relate directly to H&R Block’s use of Twitter. Who ever thunk it?
When people join Twitter, they often send an update out into the world and then go away. Nothing happens. So they don’t get it.” But once they move in to Twitterville, as you call it, and really listen and reply and become part of the community, they’re addicted. There’s nothing like it.
When it comes to truly connecting with customers, I’d say that Twitter has been the most valuable and most effective component of our social media efforts. I went back and looked at our update archive and I realized that more than half of our updates are “@ replies.” Not only have we shared tax tips and advice that serve the general community, but on a one-to-one basis we’ve helped people get jobs and professional tax training.
We’ve helped others overcome the anxiety associated with doing their taxes on their own for the first time. We’re having a blast participating in @zefrank’s Colorwars (how could H&R Block resist a “veryGreenTeam”?). We’ve discovered and resolved customer support issues and we’ve met and thanked very happy customers. It sounds crazy, but I actually feel like H&R Block has made some friends on Twitter. We even had a customer call us out as part of @garyvee’s Good People Day! We couldn’t ask for more than that.
I am getting increasingly aggravated at Firefox’s lack of adequate garbage collection. Firefox, over the typical span of usage over several days, or weeks, in which multiple tabs are opened and closed, possibly hundreds of sites visited, cumulatively thousands of JavaScript functions executed, and Flash instances instantiated, begins to consume inordinate amounts of memory. I have seen my Firefox process consume well in excess of a gigabyte, for example, though I’m only looking at 2 or 3 sites simultaneously. When I visit the Firefox IRC channel and inquire about this, as so many have before me, the excuse is given that the poor code written within websites or many memory leaks that plugins like flash and quicktime have are the culprit and are completely outside the responsibility of Firefox and its developers. I don’t buy it. Firefox, by proxy, is the new operating system in today’s world of Internet delivered applications. Thus it is Firefox’s responsibility, in my opinion, to perform aggressive garbage collection and manage memory leaked by wayward processes spawned from within it. In my typical session, where I have two gmail accounts open, and a couple of other tabs open simultaneously, I have to restart Firefox or kill it forcefully every few days it seems. As a Linux user who typically experiences login sessions measured in weeks to months of uninterrupted uptime, this is simply unacceptable. Supposedly version 3, which is currently in beta, addresses these many issues. We will see. I’m sure some of the garbage collection features and fixed memory leaks will undoubtedly help. However I feel the pathology of, “it’s not our problem” is the wrong attitude to take by Firefox developers. They need to step up to the plate as the developers of the Internet operating system of the future and do everything possible to deliver the best user experience possible.
Google releases its Google Calendar Sync utility to bi-directionally synchronize Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. Awesome (though I don’t use Outlook any more, it’s still awesome)! Now we just need to get it to sync with my Treo calendar without having to run hotsync . . . .
I would like to think the management team at Yahoo read my previous post where I shat on them for ceasing any real innovation and decided to do something about it. If you haven’t heard, Yahoo has decided to embrace the semantic web. I think this is great news. The Semantic Web essentially extends the web with defined, semantic information using microformats and RDF such that computers can understand it. This promises to dramatically impact the web in many profound ways. More precise, intelligent searches should be possible, as well as more contextual ways to present search results. In a nutshell, this is exciting for Yahoo’s future. We will have to stay tuned and see if this has any impact on Microsoft’s intent to acquire Yahoo and, more importantly, if Microsoft would continue these efforts should the acquisition be consummated. This development is also exciting for the web in general. Stay tuned!
This is my first blog post (of many, to be sure) about South by Southwest interactive, a large media and technology conference in Austin, Texas. This is the second SXSWi I have ever attended, the first having been 10 years prior, when I was a panelist on one of the first interactive panels ever, covering successful entrepreneurs under 30 and lessons learned. Boy has SXSWi grown!! I really had no idea as to the magnitude of the interactive portion of the conference; had I known, I would have been a veteran by now. Suffice it to say, I will not miss another.
I’m going to keep this initial post very short since I just got back to Houston and am tired as hell and need a few days to recoup and recall everything. For the sake of brevity, I’ll highlight some things I learned about SXSW, in no particular order of importance:
twitter is essential to knowing what is going on and where it’s happening
beer is served promptly starting at 3 pm in the bloghaus (critically important)
you know people more by their twitter handle than their real names
you don’t sleep; show up with a huge sleep surplus or bring some Provigil
the tone of the conference is irreverent and raw; people cuss during sessions and keynotes
bring comfortable shoes
bring extra phone batteries or have your charger with you (twitter drains it quickly through SMS if you’re tracking a lot of things)
don’t track “zuckerberg” through twitter and SMS during his keynote; your phone will experience epic fail
hallway conversations are as important (or more so) than sessions
network and get to know as many people as possible (I failed a little bit in this regard due to severe sleep deprivation and my usual shyness, or “closet extroversion” as Dan Light brilliantly put it - not next time!)
take business cards with you next time, dumb ass!
Guy Kawasaki is the most kick-ass, easy going, VC ever. Period.
Hugh MacLeod got a kick out of my last name (but added I didn’t look like a stoner . . .)
spend lots of time in the bloghaus blogging, playing guitar hero, eating, drinking and tweeting
you drink a lot (no really, a lot)
keep your laptop charged at all times!
Macs outnumber PC laptops 30 to 1 (at least)
twitter!! (again) - it is an important back channel, or the conversation of the collective consciousness
don’t let Sarah Lacy interview you if you’re doing a keynote and you’re a young billionaire
even if you don’t own a computer and can’t spell blog, this conference is still the deal of the century with all the great people, films, venues, music, booze and food you can enjoy
Geek and good-looking are not mutually exclusive (quite the contrary methinks, especially when you’re doubly turned on by someone with looks and brains)
the conference is completely casual and everyone is approachable no matter their status
I could go on and on. I have many post motifs drafted from the conference which I will flush out soon, once my sleep patterns have recovered and my long term memory is functional. In the meantime, I urge everyone to read Daniel Light’s most kick-ass post about the show. I think it nails it on the head. Until next time!
This is a very minor update to my series of rants about Microsoft’s crappy software.
So as mentioned in the last rant, I was backing up all the data on my Dell laptop before I wipe it clean and install Ubuntu. I left the office yesterday after starting the backup process. I came in today expecting it to be complete. Nope! Guess what? Yep, Microsoft decided it was a better idea to reboot my machine after some very important updates instead of complete my backup. It only backed up 1.7 GB, so now I’ve got to start again . . . . sheesh . . .
If I had a dime for every time . . . . I find myself muttering that often while sitting there waiting for Windows to finish some inane task, whether it’s giving the hard drive a good workout (aka thrashing), wanting to reboot for no good reason, or upon start up where 67 applications combat each other for the computer’s attention thinking they are more important than me, the user. Microsoft Windows is basically a playground for poorly written software that pays no attention to what the user actually wants to accomplish. Literally, while writing this post, my old Windows laptop I’m copying files from before I wipe the drive clean and install Linux has prompted me with no fewer than 4 dialogs insisting I reboot (and I’m not referring to the incessant “Windows must reboot” dialog after a Windows update either).
Some of my favorite work interruptions: “New Wireless Networks found!” [Click the X to close] Ten seconds later “No, really!! New Wireless Networks found! Aren’t you curious?” [click to close again] “No Wireless Connection found.” Christ! Go the fuck away will you?? Even more fun: after manually shutting off the wifi hardware on your laptop, presuming that, uh, you really want it, uh, off, “No Wireless Networks found.” No shit?!? “There’s a new Java Upate!” “Windows required an update to fix one of a gillion vulnerabilities in its shitty software and decided the hell with you and what you were working on and rebooted anyway.” “Warning! Are you sure you want to quit this crappy software? It provides an essential crappy service and should you decide you wanted to use it, it wouldn’t be hogging all your memory and thrashing your hard drive!” Or my favorite quick-launch executables that run at startup so the programs will launch faster: “Hey if you want Word to startup in less time than it takes to run to Starbucks and get coffee, we recommend you run this quick launch utility, also useful in taking up an inordinate amount of memory. This will only add about 23 minutes to your computer’s start up time.” Or “Macafee SuperVirus has decided you were working on something important so it decided to perform some updates and thrash your hard drive so it could squash competing viruses.” I’ve always liked this one with trying to kill wayward processes: “Haha got you! We displayed this task manager process list to make you think you had control over your machine, but the joke is on you. We’ve decided you’re incapable of making decisions and have determined that the process taking up all your memory, hogging your CPU to the point you could scramble eggs on it, and trashing your hard drive within an inch of its life is in fact a process you cannot Kill at this time. Go wash your car or something and check back later.” I love it when you scan the local network to find a Windows share and Windows basically locks up while searching the network for computers; my Ubuntu box does a faster and more thorough job of finding Windows shares than Windows does which is amusing to say the least. Or my very, very favorite: since I usually am on the go, I close my laptop up putting Windows in standby (which works only part of the time - the other part it just stays on and runs down the battery until it’s dead). It’s safe to say when you turn your computer on or bring it out of standby you may actually want to do something really quick, like look up something on the Internet, shoot off a quick email or read a document. Well you can forget that! When I open up the computer and pray to the Steve Ballmer lunatic gods it will come on at all, it’s pretty much a free for all between various programs deciding that there are much more important things to do that don’t involve me at all (again, usually involving intense hard drive, memory and CPU exercise).
This is the first part of many, delving into the innumerable serious deficiencies regarding Microsoft software at a high level. I promise it won’t only be ranting; I will also discuss specific solutions to each of my rants should Mr. Ballmer and his team read my insights. I’ll touch on ideas that would eliminate the above gripes and discuss further annoyances.
Shit, another dialog box. No I do not want to fucking reboot now and will let you know when I do, so please stop asking!
