Twitter spammers are getting smarter but they still make dumb mistakes. All of these accounts don’t look suspicious at first glance.
It’s in the details
No bio is a tip off
No website is another big tip off
All followed in a row which is a little weird
All have just a state name as their location
Three of the accounts all have the same recent three tweets
The top two tweets repeat words “restaurant steak” and “discounted concert tickets” twice. No people talk that way on Twitter. (humans try to save characters)
Lastly all the accounts use the same short URL’s. Just going to the + in bit.ly shows all the other accounts using that URL. Take a look at http://bit.ly/grGEgg+, anything look familiar in the conversations area?
Come on spam, I know you are learning but really? I give the people props for being more subtle but they still have a long way to go before fooling a real human.
I also discovered a new download page when I logged out
The feel of the site is clean with far more prominent calls to action. Personally I like the direction they are going, focus on discovery instead of trying to spoon feed suggested topics to a new user.
I oversee a few different Twitter accounts, @nickdenardis, @educheckup, and @waynestate just to name a few and usually have them all open throughout the day. I noticed something interesting today, they are running an A/B test on the wording of a link in the top bar.
The feature, although recently reactivated on the #newtwitter design, has yet to get an announcement on the Twitter Blog. The old “who to follow” feature got it’s fair share of criticism and was removed for a while. My personal opinion is that it was horribly implemented and didn’t really help anybody. The new “who to follow” is actually pretty good and I’ve used it a few times to discover people.
“Find People” vs. “Who To Follow”
Going in between two accounts today I noticed a difference in wording on the top bar. I ended up trying all my accounts and could only find two different wordings, their might be more though. It looks like Twitter is doing an A/B test with the link title, “Find People” vs. “Who To Follow”. I have included some screen shots below.
Personally I prefer “Find People” since it is implies an action and I am being proactive about it. But I can see for Twitter newbies that “who to follow” is more about discovering and that is what would be a more enticing action.
I hope Twitter decides to share some statistics about the test on their official announcement of the feature.
Update (Nov 22, 2010 at 3:30pm)
I was just alerted by Jesse Lavery via Twitter that he has a variation that just says “People”
The controversy came from how to start using social media, whether you should get approval first, what kind of strategy to use, do you even need a strategy?
What it comes down to in my opinion is support. No matter the size or your position at the university you must be able to justify spending your time in a medium that is right now is a mystery to most administrators.
Step 1: Become an observer
The first step to get this support and justify using your time in the social space is to listen to everything you can. Become a “Social Media Observer”, listen to all the positive and negative. One tool to do this is the Social Media Firehose, it finds almost too many references to your university by name/url. Seriously the “Wayne State” pipe finds on average 320 references per day. Seems like a lot but not everything is someone commenting positively/negatively about your university.
Step 2: Pass that information along
You will come across prospective/current students with comments or question about your university. If you cannot answer the question directly send an email to someone you know who can and ask them to help. Cross your fingers you will get an appropriate response, often if the student is not asking the question directly to the institution it is not looked at as important.
Once you get a response sign up for that web site with either your name or your university’s name and post the response. Be completely truthful and transparent, if you are signed up as yourself explain who you are or if signed up as the university let them know you are here to help.
Step 3: Social media is about customer service
In addition to the response always give the user a way to reply back or reference existing web pages, phone numbers/email. Let them know you are here to help and they can contact you any time. I am big about being that single point of contact, taking in the request doing all the research and running around then getting back to the student.
Being consistently present and helpful builds on the relationship. It shows your university cares and a great place to come and study.
Putting together justification
After a few successful or unsuccessful questions/answers write it up, put something together that doesn’t have to be huge just a one page summary of how you did it, what you found, who you sent it to, their responses and if the student replied back. Shoot it off to your boss or who ever you think will find this information helpful and explain to them how much time it actually took out of your day (hopefullly not a lot), and how much it helped not only the student but also the university to recieve feedback.
At the very least it will get social media on the radar of the administration.
Launching a new site got me exploring some new code bases and I became disappointed with the disregard large social sites have for html validation of snippets they disburse to their user community.
Since I wanted my site plain and simple to start instead of writing a bunch of code to use common API’s I decided to first go with includes and badges from sites I commonly use. The three that I experienced while creating this site astonished me on their lack of attention to detail. At least they are trying to be compliant but unfortunately they are not fully committed yet.
Twitter HTML Badge
Twitter offers a nice super customizable HTML badge to include on a site. Which is great because it is a basic div, header and unsorted list and style is up to you. Placing the code they supply on your site makes it no longer validate. On their script tag they use an invalid parameter “text”. This looks like a typo and something simple to fix but where is the quality control? Shouldn’t someone test these types of things before they are rolled to production?
Flickr offers two types of badges the HTML one does surprisingly well except they do not escape the ampersands in the src of the script tag but that is something that can easily be done by the user.
The flash version on the other hand includes an html page into an iframe but unfortunately the code in their html appears to have also been skipped by quality control. It has two main issues. Script and style sheets above the head of the document and non escaped characters in an html string that is outputted via document.write().
Rails applications have been known for their agility and standards. It takes more than just a script kiddie to get a rails application into production. So when I installed and started to customize SimpleLog 2.0.2 for my site something stuck out like a soar thumb, the archives page in the default theme did not validate. There are two options for the html, an unsorted list or definition list. Neither of them are nested correctly which makes it almost impossible to apply a consistent style across browsers.
Without re-writing the entire helper for my site I just put some extra li elements in the output and cut it down to just one missing li. I have not had time to checkout the SVN trunk and create a patch.
Final Thoughts
By far the number of pages that do not validate outweigh the ones that do on the web but it is a shame to see small agile companies acting like large corporations when it comes to quality control. One of the benefits of having a small group or an open source application is the amount to time and attention each piece can get before it is released for peer review. It was put best in Jason’s A collection of details post when he quotes Wil Shipley:
“This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”
Web standards need to be enforced by the community and it is our job as web professionals to validate our own code and when possible give some helpful hints to other developers or companies who are not taking the appropriate amount of time to validate. I put in a ticket with twitter about the “text” element and in the process of creating a patch for SimpleLog’s archive page. I encourage all developers to run with standards and not be afraid to send an email or two to promote the health of the web. Who knows you could send that one simple email that turns thousands of pages valid.
