Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Qwitter, a tool which informs you when someone unfollows you on Twitter, is likely to break relationships, sometimes before they’ve had an opportunity to prosper. This is the complete opposite to the ethos of the Twitter community.

I first learned of Qwitter (it didn’t have a name at the time) in January, when the developer asked for feedback on the functionality. I thought then, that it was a very smart widgetery piece of functionality. I still like it from a technical perspective. However, I don’t like the idea of a tool that is likely to give some of its users the wrong impression.

How can it give the wrong impression?

1. Some followers subscribe to my RSS feed instead of following on Twitter. I know this because a few of them took to the time to write and say that I shouldn’t be offended if I didn’t see them following me. Some chose RSS so they didn’t miss any of my tweets, whilst others thought I had too much to say and they didn’t want their stream taken up by so many of my tweets.
2. Some people follow/unfollow/follow… depending on the noise level they receive from individuals like me.
3. Some thought they were following me, but weren’t, as the system unsubscribed them for some reason.
4. Some thought I wasn’t following them as they were unable to send me direct messages. I checked and confirmed I was actually following them.

You could argue that Qwitter is a nice way to enable users to nudge friends who they think should be following them, but aren’t. Whilst this might be true for some, it won’t be for most. I’ve been using Twitter for longer than most - before it became a conversational tool. So, I’ve had time to learn all of the above. However, some less experienced, or people with less insight, will undoubtidly get the wrong impression and assume that people have unfollowed them for the wrong reason and without asking why, may reciprocate.

Hello - Paul Carr here, live in Terminal 5 of London’s trendy Heathrow Airport with a special guest post to thank Wubud for kindly agreeing to be drinks sponsor for Smack My Pitch Up.

What?

Smack My Pitch Up - the only tech pitch event happening in San Francisco this Tuesday. The idea is simple… you have 50 seconds to pitch your very worst tech business idea. The word ideas, best presented win exciting (crappy) prizes. A grand prize of $50 is on offer to the very worst best.

More details can be found at The Long Fail.

See you on Tuesday. And, remember, as long as Wubud are paying, drink early, drink often.

I twittered this morning

Bloggers who think posts which are relevant/warrant ‘trackbacks’ to my blog, should quote the stuff they find interesting…

Within a short space of time, I received 6 emails and DMs (including two from journalists) asking if I was referring to them. To ensure I don’t insult anyone or give the wrong impression, I’ve decided to write a slightly longer explanation here, as Twitter’s restricted 140 characters does little to help right now.

Before I continue, I’d like to explain what Trackbacks are and how to use them, as they’re not fully understood by all bloggers and they’re almost always underutilized. Even the most seasoned bloggers don’t make them accessible so others can reference their work easily.

What is a Trackback?

Why reinvent the Wheel?! Wikipedia has a great description

A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

NB. I’ve not only quoted the origin of my source, I’ve also provided a Linkback to the Wikipedia page. Italics are mine.

How to use Trackbacks

It’s simple. Copy the Trackback URL from the blog to which you are going to reference and paste it into the Trackback field provided on the administration page where you’re writing your post. If you can’t find a URL dedicated to Trackbacks you should use the URL for the post. The rest happens automatically. The author of the post to which you refer, will receive an email notification and their blog post will be updated with a link to your post - assuming they’ve enabled that feature of course.

Trackbacks normally appear within comments - click here to see what they look like on this blog. Displaying Trackbacks provides commentators a platform from which to promote their opinion on their own blog. I’m a fan of people writing their own post which has been inspired by another blogger - but only when they provide an opinion, rather than doing a copy ‘n paste.

Some reasons why you might want to write your own post instead of leaving a comment:

1. Your comment is, in your opinion, too long. (I don’t mind long comments - the comments on one of my posts last year fetched over 17,000 in word count)
2. You feel so strongly about something that you wish to solicit opinion from the readers of your own blog
3. You don’t feel comfortable or like leaving comments

It’s standard practice to provide a Linkback to the post from which you were inspired to write an opinion piece. So make sure you always link to your source.

How to implement Trackbacks on your blog

If you have a blog, my advice is to ensure the Trackback URL is the same as the post URL. This will enable others to copy and paste the URL in the address bar instead of having to go searching for the Trackback link. TechCrunch changed it’s blog to include this obvious feature. Read Write Web hasn’t - Look at this post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_buys_shelfari.php - you must scroll down the page to search and find the Trackback, which is http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4747. If they were the same URL you wouldn’t have to go searching and I wouldn’t have just confused you. It’s blogs like this that make Tracbacks more confusing than they ought to be.

When to use Trackbacks to this blog

I appreciate it when people include a Trackback to my blog - it means they rate my opinion on a particular topic and would therefore like me to read their article and potentially post a comment. In fact, I’m flattered - please don’t stop. You just have to look at my tag cloud on the left of this blog to see what’s relevant. Although, you can check out the BIMA and Segala blogs to see what else I write about.

However, some people write posts which are not relevant to me and wish to simply get my attention for some reason. Remember, I get email notifications each time someone links to my blog. If there’s absolutely no relevance I’m going to view it as spam and never return to that blog. Stop doing it. Please.

Earlier today I was contacted by a friend at a major international TV broadcaster - looking for a recommendation for a WAP/Mobile Web development company. My recommended supplier will build the platform that will deliver its entire content for a major brand via mobile. It’s a massive project and they only had 2 hours by which time to appoint a supplier. I hope they get more than 2 hours to deliver the brief.

WAP and Mobile Web are areas close to my heart, as some of you will know - in fact, one of my blog posts on the subject attracted comments that exceeded 17,000 word count from companies such as Google, dotMobi, Microsoft and Opera. So, you’d expect me to rattle off a couple of companies right away, right? No. My mind went completely blank and I couldn’t think of one provider, even though I know lots. So, I sent a message on twitter and emailed Mobile Monday - I did explain that I could only recommend a company I knew. Within minutes I received a direct message (DM) from Tom Hume via Twitter. I know Tom and was delighted to recommend Future Platforms. Tom would have been one of my first choices, if not my first, had I thought about him without the gentle nudge.

Not a bad reason to be on Twitter? That project alone is likely to pay for all of Tom’s time on Twitter. I get asked to recommend agencies and individuals all the time - Twitter is always my first port of call if I need to make an announcement. Isn’t that use case alone, enough to spend a little time on Twitter?

Follow me on Twitter if you want to be driven insane by the noise.

Fire Eagle, a location enabler for social networks is now available to the public. (Don’t mistaken it, for a social network.)

As an end user, Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, it allows other services and devices to update that information or access it. It allows the use of your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services and stuff like that…

As a social network/friend-finder, Fire Eagle enables you to make use of, users’ location - assuming you, or another social network, can capture it on your/their site and store it on Fire Eagle’s. Confused? Just think OpenID and you’ll get it.

For Fire Eagle to be a success, Yahoo! must encourage application developers to adopt it and for developers to make doption for end users seamless. The latter I fear, will not be easy. Like OpenID, a social network must send end users to the Fire Eagle Web site in order to store their location preferences. This is likely to disorientate users as they get shipped off to another brand which has nothing to do with their task in hand. This is the reason OpenID is a great solution for early adopters thus far. Great technical solution. Crap user experience.

I could be wrong of course as I’ve never used it. I’ve only seen a demonstration from Yahoo! It’s the ’shipping off to another brand’s site’ that I dislike, not the technical implementation.

This post was inspired by an email I received this morning about an event entitled “Managing the Consumer Clamour“.

The digital industry appears to be split into two in my opinion. The first half is made up of those who don’t talk about ‘managing the consumer’ because they understand the art of conversation - instead, they talk about how to enable a better conversation between brand and consumer. In fact, the best of them aren’t talking about it at all, they’re just doing it as it comes natural.

The other half is made up of old media - they’re still talking about ‘managing the consumer’ and trying to figure out how to control what they say.

You can’t manage the consumer clamour. What you can do, is influence it by making sure you get involved in the conversation. It’s cheaper and easier than ever, with tools readily available to help everyone become a publisher/creator - enabling them to influence the perception of a particular brand. This is normally done through personal blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and other forms of public arenas where it’s easy to publish an opinion for everyone to see.

What should you do?

Stop talking about trying to manage what people say. It’s impossible. In fact, trying to control what people say is worse than doing nothing. Instead, talk about how to get involved by listening to what the crowd has to say and then react accordingly. Soon, you will become proactive by asking the crowd what they think upfront.

If only I was Hugh McLeod. I could capture all of this and more, in one cartoon. Here’s a post by Hugh that’s relevant though.

Here are some cool tools for Twitter users - thanks to Philip Wilkinson

1. TweetWheel - Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually.
2. TwerpScan - If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hope those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.
3. Summize - Good, fast Twitter search engine
4. Twitt(url)y - Does a nice job of providing a Techmeme style representation of up and coming URLs that are mentioned in individual Tweets.
5. TweetBeep - as Google alerts but for Twitter

Let me know via the comments if you know of any more and I’ll add them later.

This is my first ever video post so please forgive the fact that it’s very rough around the edges. Please feel free to provide tips and feedback.

Download the video to your iTunes (4.2 MB; 02:43 minutes)

Links

• Official Web Mission Web site
• Coverage of the Web Mission on TechCrunch.com and TechCrunch.co.uk
• Some information about wubud on TechCrunch.

I read a great post on TechCrunch and thought it was worth sharing here. In short, old media people say that to succeed on the Web, they should stop trying to control the message or the audience. People who get this, don’t talk about it - it’s already assumed. I agree 100%.

Read the full post.

I was in the kitchen putting together one of the most heart-attack-enabled sandwichs you could imagine, when I started to think about the movies I rented for the long weekend. In true style, my thoughts quickly evolved into work-mode. I started to think about how good they were (or weren’t) and whether I’d use a review Web site to write what I thought about each one.

The answer was obvious. No. I couldn’t be bothered to write a review to say a particular movie was ‘ok’. If it’s ok, I’m not likely to remember it 10 minutes later, let alone spend time on the Web to write my thoughts down. It’s useful to be able to read movie reviews before renting them. But isn’t it better to ask trusted friends for their recommendations - it’s certainly a much quicker route to getting what you want; a decent movie. That’s not to say that travel review Web sites like TripAdvisor aren’t great, because they are. Sites like TripAdvisor work because they’re very niche.

The answer is either a recommendation-based site for each topic of interest, or one Web site which deals only with recommendations for each topic. The latter is the obvious choice as you only want to join one community driven site. The site/product is only as good as the people using it so the more friends you have using it, the better the experience.

Recommend Box will soon be my central source for recommendations because many of my friends also use it. It’s far from perfect, there are many changes to make the site more user friendly and new features to make it more compelling in the forthcoming release. When these come out in release 2 I’ll use it in anger.

If you want to ask people you trust to make recommendations about books, movies, restaurants and the like, join Recommend Box and get your friends to do the same.

When I have time to write a review about review sites, I’ll tell you why I think Crowdstorm has the most potential.