Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I’m sitting in Le Pain Quotidien cafe wondering what I can work on until my cinema date at 8pm arrives and a wonderful tweet comes in from my good friend Jackie Danicki, inspiring this wee blog post. It’s obviously in response to someone complaining about how some people protect their twitter updates. Below is what Jackie said (because they’re protected, I asked if it was ok to quote her).

Astonished at how entitled some people feel to see others’ Twitter updates. I use Twitter for my uses; you use it for yours.

Protected updates mean I can converse with a small, intimate, trustworthy group. Would you crash a private conversation in a pub or home?

Just very puzzled as to why some people are so concerned with how others use Twitter. It’s none of your business. Move on.

This reminds me when I tweeted back in the early days that twitter was turning into a conversational tool. To which some replied ‘I think that’s stupid’. Why? Probably because they used it as one-way communication messages at the time (i.e different to how I used it).

I can understand why Jackie protects her updates, she’s a private person and only wants to communicate with people she knows and trusts. What’s wrong with that?

I announced the registration page for OpenSoho June this morning and as a result of all the retweets from Computer Weekly, The Telegraph and others, my announcement had a potential reach of approximately 15,000 people. This can only help to demonstrate the power of twitter for marketing events, products and services. With this in mind, I decided to tweet this fun statistic in the hope someone would also retweet that, and they did, Milo from the Telegraph retweeted it. Oh the joy of it all.

In April 2008 I wrote some twitter tips to help new users better understand how to use the social network - my post includes how to make your messages more prone to being retweeted by others as I did above. Why not check them out.

When Google first announced that it had acquired Jaiku, my first question was, ‘why?’. Why buy the second best in the market?! I’m a firm believer in going after the best and only the best. Some would argue that Jaiku is more feature-rich and easier to use than Twitter. However, I was never attracted to it because none of my followers/friends were on there. ‘Better’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘better features’. In Twitter’s case, it’s main benefit was ‘people’ (i.e. users).

When Google launched Latitude I thanked my contacts at the company for educating the marketing as clearly, their product doesn’t actual solve a problem. I’ll write more about that later. By launching latitude without any Jaiku integration, it proves they were unable to make use of the software. Perhaps they knew they were flogging a dead horse. Anyway, it’s a little late to go after Twitter - they should have put in an offer when (all) of my friends were mocking me for using the service - when it was still very early and mainly used as a one-way broadcast medium.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter turned down Googles offer and according to TechCrunch, it looks like Apple is now making a move.

So, who’s going to buy Twitter? Apple, Google, Microsoft or one of the main operators (carriers)?

I’m hoping Twitter remains independent but there’s only so long they can hold back from a gazillon dollars.

Follow me on Twitter.

After seeing the love heart in my steam on Facebook last night, I tweeted that I’d never include my relationship status on Facebook because my life, believe it or not, is actually very private. A few people asked me for clarification so I decided to write a post to explain in more detail and to solicit your contribution to the conversation. 140 characters just isn’t enough right now.

You might think I put everything online, but I’m sure you’ll now realise that I never tweet, blog or facebook anything that’s private such a family matters - with the exception of one of my sisters, Deirdra, as I want to help promote her fantastic artwork.

Someone DM’d me to say that I was right because Facebook is so open. Facebook isn’t open, it’s a platform that allows you to put everything out in the open. It’s how you use it that matters. If you don’t want people to see pictures of your kids, don’t upload them. If you don’t want people to see you drunk at a party, don’t get drunk or don’t allow people to view pictures of you online by using your privacy settings - this one is particularly easy.

So, how much do you put online? What do you exclude if anything?

The tools that Twitter endorse are few and far between. So, when it’s revealed that it plans to “officially endorse” ExecTweets, and to encourage more brands to create customised Twitter homepages, it deserves to get my full attention.

I haven’t got time to write about this right now, so why not read what Milo has to say at The Telegraph - where I picked up the story.

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Follow Milo on Twitter