Social Engineering

Twitter #followfriday and #followfridays

2009-11-26T09:10:00.031-05:00

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/.

How Do Tweeters Market Their Presence on Twitter?

2009-10-30T11:42:00.017-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

How do Tweeters market their presence on Twitter? First, whenever the opportunity arises always promote your Twitter account; on websites, blogs and other forms of Web presence, always display a follow me link to your Twitter account.

There are all kinds of buttons, blidgets and widgets freely available for use on your website or blog that will help you promote your Twitter account to other Twitterers. Adding "Tweet This" and "Retweet" buttons is another effective way to promote your presence on Twitter.

Have you ever checked out the "Goodies" on Twitter.com? There are special treats for those that scroll to the bottom of the page. The Twitter Goodies page is your pathway to Twitter Widgets and Twitter Applications.

There were three categories of Twitter Goodies; widgets and applications for My Website, Facebook and MySpace. Before hooking up a widget or an application for connectivity to another site, make things easier by logging on at both sites before starting the installation.

We installed the Twitter for Facebook application, which was surprisingly simple to install and use. You know what we mean if you have experience configuring Facebook widgets and applications; things either work right the first time, or you end up treading through one help screen after another only to find out that you failed to read the instructions thoroughly enough in the first place.

Twitter applications let you send and receive Twitter updates, and they come in all kinds of attractive styles to dress up your website or blog. We did notice that on their applications page, Twitter provides the following disclaimer: "These applications were built by third-parties, not Twitter, Inc. Twitter does not provide support for these applications."

Not too worry, most of these offerings have been around awhile and work fine on most sites. As a source for more Twitter applications, Twitter suggests Twitter Fan Wiki "hosted and secured" by PBWorks.

Takeaway - The Twitter Fan Wiki site offers links to even more Twitter applications; Twitter applications for advertising, analytics, browser plugins and extensions, directories, creating drawings, entertainment, games . . . Hey, check it out -- Twitter Fan Wiki applications.

MyBlogLog a Yahoo! Service

2009-10-29T09:17:00.004-04:00

Ron aka LANWANMAN invites you to join MyBlogLog.

A little MyBlogLog background. . . .

Discover something new or cool each day. Find sites that are unique to your interests; be that "you'll never guess what I found on the Internet" person.

Learn more about the people who publish your favorite sites. What do they read? Who else reads them?

Connect with people who read the same sites as you, make the World Wide Web a little smaller and more connected.

LANWANMAN thinks MyBlogLog is so great that he has taken the time to let you know about it. Come check it out. If you've got a Yahoo! account, you're already half-way there. Join LANWANMAN! Check out www.mybloglog.com to learn more.

Ron aka LanWanMan, Ocala, Florida USA

MyBlogLog - not just for bloggers anymore.
www.mybloglog.com

Twitter Still in ICU

2009-10-20T14:22:00.004-04:00

Tuesday, October 20, 2009, it's obvious to many Twitterers that Twitter.com still hasn't fully recovered from their Sunday, October 18, 2009, outage.

Status, Twitter. “Responding to network connectivity problems.” Twitter.com. Twitter, 18 Oct. 2009. Web. 20 Oct. 2009. < http://status.twitter.com/post/216351172/responding-to-network-connectivity-problems >.

"Twitter is over capacity . . . Too many tweets! [We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.]" (Twitter error message). Combined with the negative impact brought about by Twitter's recent war against the barrage of recurring tweets launched by third-party Twitter apps like SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater), Twit Robot and others, Twitter's network connectivity problems have devastated Twitter Centric Marketing campaigns the world over.

Twitter takes the "Oomph" out of SocialOomph

2009-10-12T17:36:00.016-04:00

Introduction

SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) announced in their blog Monday, October 12, 2009, that Twitter has informed them that recurring tweets are in violation of the Twitter Terms of Service. The SocialOomph blog post includes the following excerpt from what Twitter sent to SocialOomph:

"Recurring Tweets are a violation no matter how they are done, including whether or not someone pays you to have a special privilege. We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever. They pollute Twitter, and tools shouldn’t be given to enable people to break the rules. Spinnable text seems to just be a way to bypass the rules against duplicate updates and essentially provides the same problems."

—SocialOomph Blog. "Recurring Tweets On Twitter Accounts Have Been Discontinued." SocialOomph.com. SocialOomph, 12 Oct. 2009. Web. 12 Oct. 2009. < http://www.socialoomphblog.com/recurring-tweets >.

Twitter Duplicate Text

Beginning Thursday, October 15, SocialOomph is placing all recurring tweets on pause, apparently giving their customers a chance to get copies of their recurring tweets. From that point, no further recurring tweets can be setup. Unfortunately, SocialOomph Professional lacks an export feature for its recurring tweets.

There are many solutions available to aid you with your Twitter-based Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns. In fact, to avoid problems due to unforeseen changes, it is best to use more than one method.

Three well-known, affordable solutions are Tweet Adder, Tweet Riches and Twitter Bot Friend Adder. Each package offers the same basic features: auto follow, auto follow back, auto unfollow, auto update, auto reply, auto DM, schedule messages, import followers, follow by keyword, keyword trends, statistics, multiple accounts, proxy usage and more.

Resources

See the complete article, Taylor, Ron (aka LanWanMan). "SocialOomph Discontinues Recurring Tweets." InfoBarrel.com. Hinzie Media Inc., 16 Oct. 2009. Web. 16 Oct. 2009. < http://www.infobarrel.com/SocialOomph_Discontinues_Recurring_Tweets >.

TWITTER Top 10 on Amazon.com - The Best Twitter Books

Social Engineering by LANWANMAN

2009-09-23T12:47:00.004-04:00

Introduction

Just as social bookmarking websites have all but replaced more familiar methods for bookmarking like those included in Web browsers, social networking has taken the lead over social bookmarking. Social networking provides bookmarking, sharing, discussion and much more.

Improve your Web presence. Drive traffic to your websites, blogs, personal and business profiles, articles and other web content with social bookmarking and social networking; today's popular solutions in social engineering.

Social Bookmarking: With Twitter, Skype, FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others.

Social Networking: With AddThis, ShareThis, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and hundreds more.

To learn more, see the Freelance Writers Website Social Bookmarking & Social Networking pages. Join our Freelance Writers Network (FWN) Social Engineering Group (FREE).

Did You Know for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) internal link strategy is as important as external link strategy? Furthermore, reciprocal internal links between two or more Web pages on the same website is advantageous to page ranking?