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The 5 things Twitter must do to avoid #fail

How popular is Twitter? It's so popular that some would suggest it's worth billions of dollars. But as many of us who lived through the first .com bust know all too well, it's disappointingly easy to take something that looks like it has a future filled with success and turn it into fail.

In the case of Twitter, I think there are 5 things that the company's management needs to do to avoid that fate.

by Patricio Robles 02 September 2009 09:17am 4 comments

Is Twitter turning into an 'evil' corporation?

Dean Collins sells a desktop software application called My Twitter Butler. By all appearances, it's pretty spammy. It enables Twitter users to auto-follow other users based on keywords they use and permits the mass-sending of DMs to followers.

Twitter doesn't like My Twitter Butler and Twitter's high-powered Silicon Valley law firm, Fenwick & West, sent Collins a letter demanding that he "deactivate" his website, transfer the MyTwitterButler.com domain name to Twitter, stop using the My Twitter Butler name and begin complying with Twitter's Terms of Service. Or else.

by Patricio Robles 14 August 2009 09:34am 3 comments

Scribd and SEO: live by the sword, die by the sword

Last Friday, TechCrunch reported that online document sharing service Scribd saw its traffic fall nearly 50% since June of this year. That's pretty much the SEO equivalent of a stock market crash.

According to Trip Adler, Scribd's CEO, the company knowingly made some changes that it expected to decrease traffic. One of them: "reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO".

by Patricio Robles 10 August 2009 09:47am 9 comments

CAPTCHAs or conversions?

CAPTCHAs -- those computer-generated images commonly used with website forms that challenge users to prove they're human -- are a popular tool in the arsenal against web spam.

But when looked at from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, do they help or hurt conversions?

by Patricio Robles 27 July 2009 09:29am 1 comment

New job postings hint at Twitter's future plans

Love it or hate it, Twitter is hot. So much so that it received $48m in free media coverage over the past 30 days by one estimate.

But Twitter faces some major challenges and not everything is rosy in Twitterville. A flurry of job listings the company posted over the weekend hints that Twitter is looking to hire the talent it needs to keep the company from falling off the tracks.

by Patricio Robles 21 July 2009 10:57am 2 comments

What you can learn from the success of spam email

When discussing spam emails, there's an inconvenient truth that often gets ignored: email spam is still so prevalent because it works.

Yes, those horrible emails ridden with poor grammar and spelling errors, pitching everything from get rich quick schemes to 'performance enhancing drugs', are effective sales tools for the product peddlers behind them.

by Patricio Robles 16 July 2009 09:35am 6 comments

The Seven Twitter Sins: Twitter spam techniques

Twitter is a wonderful service. But it isn't perfect. The popular microblogging service is increasingly the target of spam techniques that threaten the service's utility and value.

Here the the seven techniques that spammers are employing on Twitter...

by Patricio Robles 15 July 2009 10:21am 11 comments

Ten reasons not to follow people on Twitter

I've just been working my way through a few Twitter emails from over the weekend, and deciding whether to follow people back or not.

Having initially followed the advice of Guy Kawasaki and automatically followed everyone who followed me, I have become more circumspect lately, to keep the content more relevant.

I also tend to make snap decisions, based on the bio, and the last few posts. Here are ten reasons not to follow people back...

by Graham Charlton 15 June 2009 15:36pm 28 comments

Facebook vanity URLs coming this weekend

Cancel your weekend plans. At 12:01 am EDT on Saturday, June 13, Facebook will open the floodgates on a long-awaited landrush.

At that time, all Facebook users will be able to select a vanity URL (eg. www.facebook.com/username/).

by Patricio Robles 10 June 2009 09:10am 3 comments

Memo to Twitter: please deal with #Spymasterspam

Last Friday I wrote a piece called ‘How Twitter can dig itself out of hashtag hell’, urging Twitter to allow users to turn off ‘spam’. The trouble is that spam isn’t always defined by a hashtag (such as #Spymasterspam).

Consider the rise of the Spymaster game on Twitter. This is yet another reason why Twitter needs to quickly introduce personalisation features.

It’s hard to put into words how little I care about somebody reaching level 11 on Spymaster, or attempting an assassination attempt on @somebodyelse. And I’m not alone.

I’m sure the game itself is wondrous fun, but I don’t want to see these tweets appear in my feed.

by Chris Lake 01 June 2009 12:00pm 4 comments