Twitter #followfriday and #followfridays

According to the public Whois records, on January 17, 2009, Jeffrey Kalmikoff with skinnyCorp, created domain name FollowFridays.com (Domain Tools, 2009). Now, should that be followfriday.com (singular)?

Again, using our Internet tools, we find that domain name followfriday.com (singular) was created earlier on 15 October 2008 by the nororious cybersquatter "WhoisGuard Protected." Mr. WhoisGuard Protected's followfriday.com website advertises that the domain name is "For Sale for 5,000 USD"! Hey, what harm can one little "s" cause compared to spending $5,000 to leave it out—FollowFridays it is!

All of this might have gone unnoticed, however, the self-proclaimed tweeters to first use the influential Internet meme, #followfriday, staged the grand opening of their FollowFridays.com website November 2009. To avoid confusion, maybe we should force the evolution of Twitter meme #followfriday to #followfridays.

One nice thing about the FollowFridays.com website is the live Twitter stream display for #followfriday (it refreshes about every 2 minutes). Watching the twitterstream, among the characters appearing in bold font, we saw #followfriday, #FollowFriday, #ff, #FF, follow friday #ff, follow Friday! (the tweet included the exclamation point) but no #FollowFridays (plural). So, using upper or lower case and with or without hash tags, we can use the words and acronyms followfriday, #followfriday, ff, #ff, #FF, follow, friday and many more.

Login to your Twitter account from the FollowFridays.com main page, and you can send an update to your Twitter account up to 126 characters long. On our second attempt, we tried sending: #ff @jasmineyarr because she's a great tweeter!

Again, for the second time the message, "sending tweet..." appeared. When the browser status bar indicated "Done," the stream re-commenced to refresh, yet the "sending tweet..." message was still there.

At FollowFridays.com, their asking us to login with our Twitter ID and password might lead us to think that our tweet would update on our Twitter account's Twitter stream. Since FollowFridays.com limits our tweet to 126 characters of the 140 allowed by Twitter, one can only guess that the remaining 14 characters are for a retweet or for something to be added to our original tweet. Hmmm. . . . Still no update on our Twitter account.

Our Twitter account never prompted us for access approval for FollowFridays, and FollowFridays did not appear in Connections when we viewed our Twitter settings. Again, still no update on our Twitter account as a result of using FollowFridays, so we changed our Twitter account password.

Tips and Hints: When sending your #followfriday tweet, keep it short (120 characters or less) so that it can be easily retweeted, limit your mentions to 2 or 3 Twitter users and provide a reason why others should follow them.

For example (109 total characters with spaces): Please RT: #FF @sharon44212 @jasmineyarr & @jimatrocketmail - They love conversations with others on Twitter!

Did You Know that on November 26, 2009, FollowFridays.com had an Alexa Rank of 298,800 and a Google PageRank of 5/10? We'll check them out in six months and see how they improve.

References

Whois Record (Last update by Domain Tools November 26, 2009 at 1:00PM). FollowFridays.com Whois Record (Follow Fridays). Retrieved November 26, 2009, from http://whois.domaintools.com/followfridays.com/.

Whois Record (Last update by Domain Tools November 26, 2009 at 1:00PM). FollowFriday.com Whois Record (Follow Friday). Retrieved November 26, 2009, from http://whois.domaintools.com/followfriday.com/.