In addition to bringing you the most relevant results, search engines are many times fighting over presenting the most up-to-date pages to the searcher. That’s why Google has those time-related filters in the left, just below the “type” filters. Although recent content might be well of importance only to news-seekers, Google thinks otherwise. Long before [...]]]>Yet another step in the same direction was done several days ago, although no official announcement has been made. It seems, Twitter is getting more credit within Google, which has decided to present recent tweets in the search results. In addition, the results also show user’s picture. But more important is the fact that the link is the tweet is included in the SERP’s, making it a valuable inbound link for the featured website.
It has to be noted, that the above only applies to recently posted tweets (the exact amount of time could not be determined, but from my testing it is probably several hours, and after that the results return to the usual “join twitter to follow”. If you want to see those results, by the way, it is very advisable to include the word “Twitter” in your search query.
Google shows a tweet
Growing rapidly, with about 200 million registered users and estimated to surpass the 15 million adult users in the US in 2011, Twitter has proved as a very successful venture in the past 3 years. Based on acquisition offers, the company value has increased from $3.7 billion in 2009 to about $10 billion in the [...]]]>Instead, they want to turn Twitter into more profitable website. And the best way to ear money for an internet website is, of course, advertising. Currently, there are three options for advertising on Twitter – Promoted Tweets (that look like normal tweets, but are said to reach not only your followers but a significantly larger crowd), Promoted Trends (advertising at the Twitter home page) and Promoted Accounts (Twitter recommends certain accounts as “worth to follow”).
The problem, however, is that every potential advertiser has to submit an advertising request, which is then reviews by the Twitter staff and is either approved or not approved. The approval process is manual and, as a result very slow. Many small- and medium-sized businesses simply give up, unwilling to wait, and turn to other advertising options – such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.
Although Twitter is not going to remodel the advertising scheme completely, it is done the first step, reportedly increasing the “advertising team” to assize of 35 workers (a notable 10% of the company personnel). Their primary task will be to improve response times and also to contact potential advertisers – those who had previously expressed interest in using Twitter in their campaigns.
]]>The battle between FaceBook and Google mightbe overrated, but in terms of innovation, both companies are definitely doing their best. In the “50 Most Innovative Companies of 2011” list, published by Fastcompany Magazine, Facebook, the leader in 2010 is placed third (“For 600 million users, despite Hollywood”). Notably, one place ahead of the world’s largest [...]]]>Notably, one place ahead of the world’s largest social network is the micro-blogging website Twitter (“For five years of explosive growth that have redefined communication”). 200 million users mark is certainly not far away.
At the very top, placed first, is Apple (“For dominating the business landscape, in 101 ways”). iPad is probably the reason they went two places up from last-years third position.
And what about Google? And Microsoft? Don’t worry, both are there. Google is sixth (“For instantly upgrading the search experience”) – one place behind Groupon (5), whose courage is also admitted (“For reinvigorating retail — and turning down $6 billion”). Microsoft is only 37th – but still 9 places up from last year. Bing, and Win Phone OS 7 are both noted as good products, but it is the hand-free Kinect that impressed Fastcompany, “turning the human body into a game controller”.
Another notable inclusion is LinkedIn (“For turning 90 million members into the world’s most useful career database”) and Russian search engine Yandex (26) that is given credit for successfully battling Google in the Russian search market niche and for various complex algorithms. The list, of course, includes off-line companies, such as Nissan(4, “For creating the Leaf, the first mass- market all- electric car”), Trader Joe’s (11, for “For vaulting past Whole Foods to become America’s favorite organic grocer) and Snohetta (35, “For design that’s both social and beautiful”).
]]>Twitter has been here for over five years, but it has become a real “hit” only recently. During the last Superbowl game, a new record for number of over 4000 tweets-per-second was recorded, emphasizing the usefulness of this tool when you want to share your thoughts/impressions/ideas/anything else quickly. But maybe the founders/owners of twitter have [...]]]>But maybe the founders/owners of twitter have finally decided to make some serious profit from the almost-two-hundred-million registered users? According to some unofficial reports, Twitter had talks with both Google and FaceBook about a potential deal – that is the buyout of Twitter, of course.
While the talks are, reportedly, in the very early stages and seem more like a “what-if” scenario for Twitter, the figures mentioned show that the micro-blogging site’s value went up considerably. It is now estimated about $10 billion, opposed to about $3.7 billion figure, reported about a year ago.
An interesting is that the two “potential buyers” are Google and Facebook. Not Yahoo, not Microsoft… With Google being a runaway leader in the search industry niche and FaceBook establishing itself as an undisputed number one social media , blogging (and micro-blogging) seems like a field that neither of the two has a real advantage. So, will Twitter serve as a neutral ground for a decisive encounter between the two giants? I guess it will take several months, and maybe years until we get a conclusive answer to this question…
]]>Woke up this morning thinking further about my statement yesterday that Microsoft should by Twitter. I really think that if Google does not buy Twitter and it lands in the hands of Microsoft, it could potentially become a great equalizer. Bing’s real time search results would be exclusive and therefore at the very least very [...]]]>On the other hand if Facebook buys Twitter, Google has a much bigger problem, potential elimination from real time search. Facebook is the number one visited website in the world. Now this is great, but their problem is, their visitors are not interested in buying anything, they do not click on ads, they do not convert into $$, and this is becoming a problem for the future of Facebook. It is sort of the old school internet business model on steroids: build it,make it cool and free, get traffic, and with traffic all your problems will be solved. Now if your roll Twitter into Facebook, you do not get any better profit generation, but now you hold all the cards in real time search. Facebook could place extraordinary value on this real time data, and begin to charge search engines massive amounts of fees to access their websites and data. If the search engines do not agree to pay these outrageous fees, then Facebook can begin to build their own search engine. Even if their algorithm was not very robust to begin, with having the real time data from Facebook and Twitter would insure that they provide phenomenal real time information (that would not be found anywhere else) and can use this real-time data VERY effectively. It is a fact that no one is really Tweeting or Facebooking about the spamming Viagra website they found on page one of Google, nor the insurance website they found in BING. Therefore Facebook would be able to quickly put a serious reduction on spam, create a place in search, and provide themselves with very bright future for profitability and a serious chunk of what Google and BING currently have.
As an internet marketing professional, I really do not care who does what. I do not own the game, just play by the rules set forth by people far smarter and wealthier than I. I must say though, I really like Twitter in the hands of Facebook or Microsoft. Lets see what Google is really made of….
]]>Twitter has mad a strong progress in the recent years. It has been a useful tool both for fun and, of course, business. Respectable companies are tweeting, telling their followers about company news, promotions etc. It is only a matter of time for world’s most popular the micro-blogging platform to reach 200M registered users – [...]]]>Notably, according to recent research, only 50% of the tweets are in English. It seems that Twitter decided to carry on its success in the Asian market as Japanese is the second popular tweeting language and Malay is fourth with Portuguese being third due to the tool’s extreme popularity in Brazil. However, instead of addressing the challenging Chinese market, Twitter skippers have picked Korean as the seventh supported language (don’t confuse with the messages language, which can be almost anything, form Tamil to Hebrew and Arabic) in addition to the existing English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
The decision is based on the amazing growth rate of South Korean Twitter users (almost ten times in 2010) and the country being relatively advanced in technological terms. The relevant iPhone app and Twitter mobile for Android in Korean have also been launched, making tweeting easier for the South Koreans.
]]>Twitter has been here for quite a while, but it has really grown in the recent two years. And lately, with the people tweet to share their ideas and opinions as well as notify their friends (aka followers) about the current news, almost every business is using Twitter constantly for promotion offers and other valuable [...]]]>The competition in the online world is pretty severe, and Twitter is no exception. The users need to become more and more creative to make you follow them. Another important task is preserving the follower’s base. And one the ways to achieve that is to let them share an opinion with the “big brother” – the brand. That’s what Twitter Chat is about – allow followers (aka customers) to ask questions and offer personal opinions. Although it is doubtful that any of these ideas will be actually heard in the company HQ (although some certainly might), the “round-table” definitely present a certain level of satisfaction for the clients.
Additionally, this emphasizes a very important thing in the internet era – there are actual people behind the brand. @username is not a tweeting robot; it is a living human being that can chat with you from time to time.
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Twitter LOVES twitter spam. Is there an official name for twitter spam? Twam (OK I will trademark that)? Why do I say this? Because I found it shockingly difficult today to find a tool to Bulk Unfollow on Twitter. I have been in quite a dog fight today. In theory what I am trying to do should be [...]]]>
Twitter LOVES twitter spam. Is there an official name for twitter spam? Twam (OK I will trademark that)?
Why do I say this? Because I found it shockingly difficult today to find a tool to Bulk Unfollow on Twitter. I have been in quite a dog fight today. In theory what I am trying to do should be simple. I would like to bulk remove spammers and defunct Twitter members that a client is following due to the use of one of those auto follow programs.
This Twitter account is currently following 20K members, and has about 20K people following them. I don’t want to close the account as they would lose many loyal followers; my guess is about 5K. So we need to remove all the junk. We started out by trying to remove them manually within the Twitter interface, 20 minutes removed about 200 and I quickly figured out this was not going to work. So I decided to look for some tools online that could assist me with the removal of most of the people currently being followed.
I found plenty of tools to remove Twitter followers, and of course tried the free ones first. With zero success on those, it’s possible that these free tools are not being properly maintained. Time to spend some money to get the right tool. The first paid tool would not get past the API call to Twitter after 30 minutes. I’m fast becoming frustrated, but luckily I find a nice blog post listing 23 tools. Here’s that list for your reference:
http://www.aboutonlinetips.com/mass-bulk-follow-unfollow-tools/
And here is a summary of what I found checking these out:
http://www.socialoomph.com/ did not try this one, as no where did it mention bulk removing of twitter members being followed.
- Although at second look I noticed about ¾ the way down the page they do say If you find that you are following a large number of accounts that you don’t really want to follow, you can use our system to completely wipe out your friends list. When the process is done, you will be following nobody and will be able to hand-pick those accounts you want to follow. Due to the Twitter rules, this feature is not available on Twitter accounts. So maybe they can offer the start anew.
http://www.jdwashere.com/twiping/index.html Twiping looked really promising, quickly dropped $9 on this, downloaded the application. Except all it did was lock up my computer, multiple times, tried it on multiple twitter accounts. Really annoying.
http://www.theunfollowed.com/home.php Looks really easy, log into twitter, and unfollow in bulk, perfect. But after logging into the Twitter account authenticate, it kicks back to http://www.theunfollowed.com/home.php, and when I click on bulk, nothing happens, locked up. Tried this in Firefox, Chrome and IE….same thing, just locks up.
http://www.tweemaid.com/ Tweemaid is another tool that claims to wipe the list clean, but 3 browsers and all I get is taken to a dead page at the end.
http://joeldrapper.com/untwollow/ Untwollow only removes 1 twitter following at a time (I think not confirmed its removal as I did not have time for one at a time)….yet another lost cause.
http://friendorfollow.com/ This tool seems to function, but does not do what I am looking to do. The tool just shows you who you’re following that is not following you, possibly useful, but will not work for this task.
http://www.huitter.com/ apparently does not exist any longer.
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ also looked promising, never a good sign when it says on the page, if it does not work in 5 minutes you should reload the page and try again….guess what that would be me, moving on.
http://www.mycleenr.com/ apparently out of business, but they were kind enough to recommend two other services. They recommend FriendorFollow which I tried with no success, and:
Refollow http://www.refollow.com/refollow/index.html The verdict is not out yet, I paid them $20 and am waiting 24 hours for a confirmation of payment? (Certainly not giving me the warm fuzzies, they may as well of sent something via the US post office).
http://www.buzzom.com/ Does not even mention on the website how to begin…
http://twitoria.com this looked good except it only appears to list out the users that have not been active on twitter in some time, does not appear to give an opportunity to get nuclear on them.
http://tweetblocker.com/ this website appears either down or gone…..I vote for gone.
Needless to say the list goes on, I tried probably 5-6 others I cannot even find the names of.
I did find two that work!
http://untweeps.com was fairly simply to log in, it apparently only permits you to unfollow people who have not tweeted in a specific time range, like in the last 30 days for instance, although if you sign up for $2.00 you can remove just about everyone. If your patient with loading time you can remove about 700-1000 at a time (secret put 0 in the box for time since last tweet).
http://tweepi.com Also works but will only permit you to remove 20 (or 40 at a time if you tweet about how wonderful they are) at a time.
In order for these two services to work, you need to download one of the two Firefox checkbox plug ins:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2393/ I tried this one with Firefox 3.6.13 and it would not work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9740/ this one specifically said it would not work with the latest browsers. So I downloaded Firefox 3.0 and this utility worked great.
For either tool, simply highlight the entire section you want to check, then right click and select check. All boxes checked, then click Remove.
In finally finding these two websites that actually appear to work, I discovered something interesting. Twitter is making bulk un following people VERY difficult. They actually state in their terms and conditions of API usage that a “Check All button was a violation of the TOS (terms of service)”. In theory what Twitter is saying is it is very interested in keeping up inflated numbers of members, followers and activity, to such a degree that bulk no following is basically becoming impossible.
I suppose that Twitter in a half hearted way likes Twitter spammers, auto bots and deadbeat users, because if they really wanted to eliminate these users, offering the opportunity to bulk remove people would not be such a mighty task.
I could understand if Twitter took a very hard line approach to all API applications, but many of the auto-follow applications work flawlessly, but seems bulk removal of following people is discouraged.
I hope my 4 hours of time can save you time if you find yourself needing to find a Twitter Bulk Un Follow or Removal tool.
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Twitter has recently added the nofollow tag to all links left on the users’ bio field. This change has been the object of much controversy in both the SEO and the Internet marketing industries. Why? Because many suspect Twitter to have succumbed to Google’s pressure. How did this story begin? Everything started when David Naylor [...]]]>How did this story begin?
Everything started when David Naylor published a Twitter backlink tip on his blog. That same day, Matt Cutts — yes, you read it right — sent an email and a twit to Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams, regarding Naylor’s post.
Now can you see the origin of this controversy?
Many people believe that Cutt’s email was interpreted by Twitter’s staff as a warning or something like that, hence the decision to give no link juice at all to any Twitter users.
What are people saying about this change on Twitter?
- As usual, many have been using the (old, unoriginal) classical argument: both Twitter and Google are entitled to run their business as they see fit; if you aren’t happy, choose other services or start your own.
- Several have pointed out that at the stage Twitter is, it shouldn’t be afraid of Google, since it doesn’t depend solely on Google traffic to succeed.
- Many Twitter users agree that, being a microblogging service, Twitter should let links pass juice, like any other blog service (e. g. Blogger/Blogspot, which is owned by Google). After all, since Twitter relies on user-generated content, it would be only fair to reward members for making Twitter so powerful and famous.
- Some have suggested that instead of punishing all members by automatically adding the nofollow tags to all links, Twitter should find a way to distinguish good, honest users from ill-intentioned ones and treat both types accordingly. Therefore, Twitter should adjust its technology so that nofollow is removed from the links posted by non-spamming members.
- It has been noted by several people that it is Google who should fix its flawed algorithm, instead of expecting that site owners do all the spam fighting.
- Those who support Google and Twitter often claim that the change on the microblogging service only affects a small part of its users, i. e., those familiar with SEO. Other Twitter members simply wouldn’t care at all. However, it’s been argued that just because someone isn’t aware of a benefit, doesn’t mean said benefit should be denied to them.
What do Twitter’s staff and Matt Cutts have to say?
I’ve read the official Twitter Blog and couldn’t find anything on this subject over there. They do write regularly about their fight against spam. Still, no mention to the nofollow controversy. Same goes for their most recent newsletter, which I received two days ago: not a single word about nofollow and the such.
It’s possible that this topic has been discussed by their staff via Twitter itself. Since I don’t follow any of their employees, founders etc., I may have missed something. In case you have spotted this “something” that I’ve supposedly missed, please share the link(s) in the comment form.
As for Matt Cutts, since his name is directly involved in this controversy, I hoped he would blog about it (which was the main reason why I didn’t write this post earlier). Fortunately for me, he eventually did it. Nonetheless, I must say that Danny Sullivan’s comments are by far the very best pieces you will find on that page.
]]>For a number of months, Twitter has been the darling of the technorati. It was simple, easy to use, and most of all, it was addicting. For marketers, it was another way of tapping into conversations, and knowing what was hot in the eyes of the twittering public. News had a way of breaking out [...]]]>However, its popularity ultimately brought Twitter down, literally. Its servers suffered from multiple downtimes over the weeks, making it too unreliable for some people. A portion of them began considering other options, and one of the most talked about right now is FriendFeed. Some pundits are so enthusiastic about it that they call it the next big thing after Google. Of course, I want to take that with a grain of salt.
If you haven’t heard about them before, here’s what’s written in the site about page:
FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends. Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.
One of the great things about FriendFeed is that it enables “social contextual search”. Using their advanced search feature, enter a keyword and you can filter the results to only the relevant sites shared by your friends – that is, people you trust. This has a huge potential for highly targeted advertising. In order to be useful, you’d need to have a substantial number of friends who actively share sites, but that may not be much of problem for long.
As for marketing and promotion, it’s a great tool. Tim Bauer gives an example:
FriendFeed is interesting in this conversation as it enables the evangelist to efficiently share out their research. An article on google reader at 8:30 a.m. A few relevant images from Flickr at 9:00 a.m. Twitter blathering from (9:30 to 10:30). A good quote from a book at 11. Some relevant blog posts on XYZ reader at 1. A webcast you recorded on QIK at 3. All tidbits leading to something (or nothing) in the form of a more formal statement (your blog?). Your power consumers will love the access you can provide them.
Already several high profile bloggers like Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, and Steve Rubel have been singing praises for FriendFeed. The question is, will it catch on with the mainstream? Time will tell.
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