Do You All Want to Know That I Periodically Say Argh?

So last week Facebook posted this neat little piece to their blog about the public Facebook status update. Yes, you read that right. The gist of it is that those users out there who have set their status privacy to “Everyone” will see your status updates. This post states: “if you have access to this beta version, every time you publish content into your stream you are able to control which people can access that specific piece of content.”

Most of the uproar, as you can see per comments, is that users don’t want to have to select who will see their status update, each time a status update is made. In that way, it seems a little similar to email and reply all: make sure you don’t reply all when your really mean to just reply. But it seems this intial uproar was before Facebook qualified its post to note the following:

The beta is only open to people who already chose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone.” For those people, the default for sharing from the Publisher will be the same. If you have your default privacy set to anything else—such as “Friends and Networks” or “Friends Only”—you are not part of this beta.

You think FB would have learned from previous privacy issue announcement debacles, like the few months ago TOS incident, in which they own all your content, or wanted to (if I recall, they revised the TOS after outcry and shaming). Of the 200 million plus users today, so many of them already get upset about various privacy issues, although controls do exist. (It’s on my to-do list to invoke some further FB lockdown.)  Will the bulk of these users realize that they have set their status updates to “everyone” and realize the consequences? Surely, yes, now with the post we are all clear about what Facebook is doing, theoretically. But in practice, would some unintentional “everyone” posting be the nail in the coffin, driving users away from this platform? In other words, has Facebook set up the opportunity for too many people to finally foil themselves and run away? This game of connect the dots about my public persona may just speed up.

I can’t imagine wanting to post a Facebook status update as public for everyone and if I had done so by mistake, oh the horror. With Twitter, I post to Tweetdeck and usually autopost to Twitter as well, although it’s a more tech-oriented tweet for which I receive ridicule. But creating a status update precisely for Facebook – I’d like the post to stay there. So argh, argh, argh, argh. There’s just one and only one, Facebook status update, for you.

Super Chirp – Anyone Listening to this Birdsong?

I’m getting back to the blog. I found this article this week called “Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp.”  In sum, one may have the priveledge of being paid for their tweets. Who would like to pay for my tweets? Nobody, I am not glamourous.  Let’s move onto Britney Spears. This service will allow you pay for her tweets and receive her tweets as DMs. This is a publishing model for celebrities. Hmmm, I don’t think Super Chirp will receive my payment for tweets. You however, can pay 0.99 to $9.99 per month to get these kind of tweets. Why am in disinterested and having more fun without this noise?

1. DM messages – I haven’t found anyone who likes these. This service makes me tweak, it’s like paying someone to provide you with email overload.
2. Real-time – In my real-time, I can find amazing tweets already, for free. Will this always be the case? I don’t know, time will tell. But since I am already enjoying this, why rock the boat. Also, real-time need not be consumed with knowing about Britney’s latest hairstyle. If I am in the mood, a two second glance at the latest trash mag in the grocery checkout lane will fix that.
3. Who Will Super Chirp? – It’s a nice idea for charities, in theory. i.e. That is you would pay for these charities tweets and aid the cause. In reality, it’s just another textual item in your day, whereby the real message becomes a fleeting thought.

For me, it’s a hard sell. Now back to my fab free tweetastic fun.

Finally Pimping My Tweetdeck

A few months back, I downloaded Tweetdeck on my home laptop and I had yet to tweak it for the productivity gains that it might provide. Today I took the first step, setting up the following features below for my use.

• Groups – Where can you make a group for Twitter? Tweetdeck. Examine why you use Twitter and what are the kinds of folks you are following. How would you aggregate them into top groups? In sum, overall the folks I follow may be these: librarians, social media users, entrepreneurs, web geeks, marketers, business leaders, people I know personally in real life, healthcare news and advocates, nurses, physicians, and others that just bring a bite of humor to my busy life. Given that, I created these groups: Social Media (top social media tweeters I like); Twitter (tools and tweets on using Twitter, may have overlap with SM category); Librarians (including libraryland stuff); Work Related; and Fun and Entertainment (my personal miscellany).  The limitation: You can only have 10 groups. Try to create another one, the following message is delivered, “you are already using 10 columns, you could delete one and try again.” Also, there are only so many friends you might see available as adds to your group, see this post on why that is the case.
• Frequency – I reorganized the columns so the ones I want to see the most are at the left, less scroll. I set up a time limit filter for the last 24 hours for each column – see great details on this here, question #16. I’m trying to just use Twitter when I can – I get the updates I can get, when I get them, other updates I just miss, such is life.

It’s a start…

Auto DMs on Twitter: Good, Bad, or Ugly?

If you are uniniated to the lingo, an auto DM is a direct message that you get when you start following someone. Now that I am following 200+ people, I can say that I have a sense of what these are now, as I have received many a DM post-follow. And naturally, I wonder if I should have a DM set up for myself? If so, what should it be like?

Let’s first look at some characteristics or categories of DMs that may exist, based on the ones I’ve received.

• The “free” offer – I sometimes get the “hey check out my free e-book” or some other offering. On occasion, I might like to do this, although I haven’t yet for those who have sent me some interesting item. In other instances, there is a button named delete.
• “thanks” for following – that pretty much says it all. IMHO, I don’t think these are necessary, although it is nice to see such thankfulness ins social networking.
• More Twitter – Since we connected on Twitter, if you have something Twitter-like you can share with me in your DM, that might be useful. I’ve received a few messages with other Twitter references or followers on Twitter, I like that.

Here are my thoughts on why an auto DM, although seemingly destested, might be worthwhile, if done right:

• In this DM, you share something that you haven’t already shared in recent tweets or in your basic profile space. Perhaps it is a tip, a link to check out your friendfeed, Linkedin profile, a slideshare deck, anything else new and exciting.
• You actually do want to build your Keith Ferrazzi quotient for the day and offer yourself as a resource to people. You want to help other people succeed. Provide some information about how you might do that.
• Could it be a forum for asking a question, which you hope will engage the user and write a @craftydlib replyback to you? Of course, if this is the course of action, you might want to change up the question in your DM fairly frequently, in-line with your number of new followers.

Thus far, I think I received a few post-follow message that was personalized, or so I think, as it contained my name. Since my first name is not in my Twitter handle, I assumed this was a personal message, but there is probably a tool that would extract my name from my profile for input in the auto DM message. Of course, I just found TwitterDMER that will perform this function.

No worries, I haven’t set up my own DM yet, so you can follow me without fear. I’m not sure that I will. I haven’t received too many that are overwhelmingly useful yet, well for my purposes anyway. But if you need me, you know were to look.

Perhaps Friday Nights Are Now for Tweetaholics

Random: Since I have not posted this before, take a moment to regress and watch Tim Ferriss in his YouTube pen flicking stunts and then you can practice yourself.

Ok, onto the post now: So my lack of blogging is of course because it takes so much time. Hence my research project into productivity and Twitter. Of course, it can be a time sink, or not. Let’s assume the latter. Lately, I have been examining at various Twitter tools, including but by no means limited to the following:

• Mr. Tweet
• Tweetlater
• Twollo
• Tweetdeck
• Joint Contact
• Twitterfeed
• and others…to be continued

Yes, most people in my daily life still think Twitter is useless. In fact, who out there is surrounded only by people who think Twitter is useful? Well, maybe a few select social media strategists. Below are some recent findings on Twitter or about Twitter that have proven productive for me.

How Twitter Has Helped My Frantic Life in the Last Week:

• I found out that people were reading reading a certain marketing communication from work, as the essence of the message was tweeted.
• I easily located highly applicable information for my Twitter productivity project, from well, Twitter.
• I started following my classmates in social networks and virtual worlds class (Sundays at 6pm in Elluminate via Babson or Second Life). It would be cool if we had a Tweetup since we all meet just virtually for this class.
• In a moment when I post this, my post should auto-populate over to Twitter, if I used Twitterfeed correctly
• I got my first iphone this week (yes, I’m feeling some major glee) and so set up my apps and will start experimenting with productivity from the mobile Twitter suite of options – no dearth here.

Well – it’s nearly time to adjourn as I’m heading out to a productcamp tomorrow for a good time, surely to include Twitter in there somewhere.