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As always, I’m a sucker for good info-graphics and good motion-graphics. Put the two together and you’ve really got me.
You have to watch this a couple times to really internalize some of the numbers. In particular, Facebook’s overall dominance is simply staggering.
(via @micah)
I’m currently working on a book cover design for none other than my dad, Chuck Blakeman. We’ve got a few different designs we’ve narrowed it down to, and I thought I’d have some fun by throwing a couple of them out on Twitter to get some responses.
The above aren’t all of the ideas I came up with, but representative of the 4 different directions of the design choices.
I put out a couple tweets asking for opinions and started getting responses almost immediately.
So far, what has surprised me the most is the polarization between the grey covers and the more colorful covers. It’s almost a mutually-exclusive response. If you like the grey cover in the first set, you’ll like the grey cover in the second. If you like the white cover, you’ll like the blue/yellow cover.
I’m not sure what to do with that information yet, but it’s fun to see the strong pattern in responses. What would you pick?
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I’m loving the new app Chatrbox from Elliott Kember. It’s well executed, simple, and, especially if you’re using a WebKit browser, really, really sexy. Hector Simpson helped Elliott with the design. You can read more about it in Elliott’s announcement blog post. There’s even an iPhone version.
Oh, and one of my favorite things about the app: it’s one of the few Twitter apps that doesn’t force-tweet anything to your timeline.
With all of the talent at their disposal, I really don’t understand the new Twitter homepage (you have to be signed out to see it). Apparently, neither did Fred Yates. He put together a thoughtful article pointing out some of the good changes they made, but also took it a step further and made his own changes to the new design. I think he nailed it. Frankly, I hope Twitter simply implements what he’s done for them.
I agree – I wonder who will be the first to recognize this and capitalize on it. Flickr has done well charging $25 per year for their pro account. I bet Facebook or Twitter could get $15-$30 a year for access to better customer service, some other tools, things like that.
When it happened to me, it made me realize the value of reliable service providers, and responsive customer service. I would absolutely pay a membership fee to be able to count on both, even on a social community site.
I’ll say this up front: I sincerely (and selfishly) wish I had written and posted this months ago. I posed the following argument to a friend not long after I had become hooked on Twitter, and frankly, had I written about it then, I would’ve looked like a genius at the outset of the fix replies debacle. Instead, you’ll have to take my argument for what it may (or may not) be worth now:
Huh? Let me explain: Twitter is brilliant because of its simplicity and the way it lends itself to being an open and public messaging/broadcasting platform. These basic tenents are what differentiated it and helped it become what it is today among a host of other more “traditional” social network sites.
I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features. There are no groups, there are no sub-sets or tiers of users. No special treatment. Up until Twitter “fixed confusing replies” (as they originally put it), everyone saw what everyone else wrote (unless they chose not to). You are valuable to people on Twitter if they listen to you and find value in what you say. On some level, Twitter stumbled into what it is today. It would be hard to come up with a more simple structure for a social network if you tried. Simplicity is the genius of Twitter. But there is a problem…
It’s also odd that Twitter would release this feature, which makes it easier for people to communicate in self-contained groups, when it seems like the company is moving in the opposite direction towards a broadcast model, where the emphasis is on tweeting at large groups of people that you don’t know.
Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs of slash7 have put together an amazing Twitter visualizer based on some basic ways people express preference and emotion:
It’s very well done. And there’s even a Mac OSX screensaver version.
(via @mg)
A little bit of personal responsibility…
While I think there is something to be said regarding spammy behavior on Twitter, this is the ultimate issue: you choose who to follow (or not), so at some point you have to stop whining about it.
Read the full article, if you get a chance, it’s excellent.
Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”
(emphasis mine.)
…you need a Social Media Strategist/Guru/Mahatma to run point and decipher the turbo-complicated, multi-leveled world of the big, wide web.
Only you don’t.
You don’t need those sites and you don’t need that guy on your team. You need to find The Mission and do everything in your power to ignore the voices that compromise it.
It’s always interesting to watch the evolution of a social network. The early Twitter adopters are starting to grumble. And they have good points.
Now you have authority. Or so you think. Now you are important. Or so you think. Now you are a spammer. Or so I think.
Welcome Twitter, the MySpace.
As it happens, this is also my Twitter policy. I can’t and won’t follow everyone. But I’ll do my best to interact with you if you interact with me.
BONUS: “In the realm of electronic communications, you owe me nothing. Not a follow-back on Twitter, not a response to an @ reply, not an answer to my emails… Counterpoint. It goes both ways.”
I do not follow everyone back who follows me on Twitter. When I follow you, it’s because your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. It’s not a ploy to get you to follow me back, that’d make me a spammer.
Don’t be a spammy-mcspammerton.
It won’t get you anywhere.
Sure, build an “Elite Power Account”, but don’t call yourself expert, maven, guru, or coach. Spamming Twitter does not make you a Premier Thought Leader. It makes you an Idiot.
So this thing called Twitterank spread like wildfire today. But one has to wonder if the hype was deserved. Most people did not notice a box on the signup form (checked by default) that indicated the service would post your “rank” to your account. And this isn’t exactly what I would call complex software. Sigh.
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