mirco's.net

Updates from January, 2009

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  How To Lose Followers And Alienate Tweeple

  admin 11:40 on Sunday, 11. January 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flashmob, follower, following, movement, movie, movietwitter, participant, renaming, search (2), title, tweet, tweets, twitter (2)

  It all started on a typical Friday evening with nothing to watch on TV. I turned to Twitter and noticed some strange posts with renamed movie titles tagged #movietwitter.

  Since I’m a huge movie fan I opened a search panel for this tag and found that already some hundred people joined into this “event”.

  

   After a short while this tag showed up at the top of the trending topics on Twitter Search and continued to grow and it continued to rise to the top of Twitter Search and Twitscoop.

  

  Since every participator was typing large volumes of bogus movie titles, some, more reasonable people got annoyed and started filtering, blocking and to unfollow people.

  

  Personally, filtering is the best option for such an occasion, since Twitter is all about following people with topics and interests similar to yours. But to unfollow people just because they have a good time with something you don’t want to accept is kind of childish.

  

  The results of the way was that I lost about 4-5 followers and gained 3 new ones. One of the people unfollowing me joined up again on the next day and I still liked what we did on Friday.

   

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  Where's Waldo? Social Geotagging

  Mirco 16:00 on Friday, 7. November 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bkite, blog (2), blogging, bloging, brightkite, data, geoblogging, geotaggin, iphone (6), moblogging, network (3), plazes, Privacy (2), smartphone, sms, social (3), socialnetwork, twitter (2), updates (2), web2.0

  In the last few months I was using some Geotagging services and tried to figure out, how to utilize them into my every day work and travel.

  I first started with Plazes, a Germany based startup that was recently acquired by Nokia. For mobile Notebook users this service offers some very convenient search options, integration with lifestream.fm and twitter as well as phone support via SMS.

  

  Although I couldn’t get the SMS service to post my current position, not having to use a smartphone to update  the current location is good new for company users with standard cell phones.

  

  during the last week Plazes announced the m.plazes.com mobile website. This gives you most of the features from the full blown application with less network traffic. searching new locations is a bit more complicated but the results have gotten better during my tests.

  

  The second services I tested is BrightKite.com.

  In addition to positioning Brightkite also offers photo uploads and short messages. It integrates into Twitter and the most common social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

  

  Additional to the standard Website there are a mobile and an iPhone optimized version at m.bkite.com and i.bkite.com as well as an iPhone application and SMS service available.

  The main difference in service is the privacy option in Brightkite. All of your contacts can be set to one of three trust levels: Trusted Friends, Friends and Everyone Else.

  Each of these groups receives different details on your current location. You can choose between Exact, City and Hidden, which will not display your location at all.

  So while Plazes will always post the complete address of your location to anyone Brightkite will only post the level your chose to twitter and show the details to trusted friends logged into Brightkite.

  For me Brightkite currently offers the better overall service, with its easy to use iPhone application and privacy settings.

   
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  Facebook down?

  Mirco 10:30 on Friday, 2. May 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: community (2), down, error (4), facebook (3), offline (2), outage, social (3), web

  Now, this is what I call a spam free Facebook!

  Recently I had the impression that Facebook more and more becomes a spam and ranting platform. everyday I have to read through tons of abusive comments, spam application invitations, just to find the important messages that are actually for me or at least interesting to me.

  So I was going through my daily social web lookup, to see if anything happened and to delete some more spam from my accounts. When I opened my Facebook link it looked like this.

  

  Yeah, it’s in German, but since the site won’t work I can’t switch the language to see if it’s a general problem or just the localization.

  —

  UPDATE: Seems like it’s “only” staring page that doesn’t work.

   
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  Let's Face(book) it

  Mirco 8:00 on Monday, 12. November 2007 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: administration (4), antisocial, content, control, extremism, facebook (3), management (5), network (3), racial, social (3), spam

  dubios”…
  Born with no soul
  Lack of control
  Cut from the mold of the anti-social
  Plug them in and turn them on
  Process the data
  …”

  >> Papa Roach – Dead Cell (Infest / 2000)

  I’m not sure if they in reality were talking about Facebook.

  The more and more the site (and the hype) develops the more I get the feeling it’s going terribly wrong. Being member of two networks and several group I noticed two things which really start getting me pissed.

  One is that the corporate use is not used at all. My company has Networks in several social communities and the Facebook network is the least active although biggest by number. This could be caused by the members (yeah, I know: user generated content) and be limited to my company, but I don’t really see a point in using Facebook as a corporate platform, especially with all the tracking and profile related advertising.

  Second. There simply is no control of the content in the other networks.

  Well, you could think if someone spams the discussion boards with cracked computer game CD keys and advertises websites selling these keys, the threads would be removed and the account disabled. At least I did.

  If you report the threads, they are deleted some days after, but the account stays active and just posts some more advertisements.

  On the other hand you have some, lets call them… Bob, flooding the boards with any kind of religious, extremist, racial, antisemite, younameit content and you can do nothing about it other than report it to Facebook and wait for nothing to happen or abandon the group or network.

  Usually I’m not a quitter, but at the current state the Facebook system is in they can keep it!

  Like the song said, take a stupid idea, create a hype, drag the people in and sell off to the highest bidder.