Categories
Social Media TechBiz

5 Ways to Reduce Twitter Spam

I’ve been working on reducing the amount of twitter spam.

To me Twitter Spam is any sort of @ reply or DM that links to a site that tries to hack you back, and it can do so more than you care for.

Here are 5 ways that work for reducing twitter spam:

  1. The silent cannot be spammed. If you stay quiet for a few days the amount of folks who will spam you goes down.
  2. Make your account private.
  3. Prune your account of the spam-like and spam vectors. For me this means removing folks that follow more than have followers or act like bots (because they probably are). This also means using Echofon on the iPhone. Echofon is helpful in that it shows the vector a spammer used to get to me. In this case I might get spammed an at reply every time a certain user “ats” me back. Echofon makes this very obvious.
  4. Actively block spammers and report them as spam.
  5. Avoid using terms that spammers like. You know the one’s I mean. I’d mention it here but it would ruin my blog’s ranking. 😀
Categories
Social Media TechBiz

3 Things The Social Network Taught Me About Startups

Spoiler Alert: You’ve been warned.

If “The Social Network” has a subliminal message, it’s this:

“Swinging for the fences means forgetting about everything they taught you in business school, and if you went to business school, you are fucked.”

1.Lunch Meetings and Face to Face is for losers.

If you are going to New York to talk to ad men, you are just cosplaying “Mad Men.” In fact, any social interaction that isn’t mediated and accelerated through something like Flowtown, or Salesforce, or LinkedIn is just that, cosplay. If you are doing business over lunch, then you might as well be dressing up for Renn Faire.

The lesson of this is one of the pivotal scenes in “The Social Network.” Not to give away too much, but in the movie, Fincher and Sorkin take great pains to show what happens to someone who doesn’t get it, even if he’s a co-founder. This person who didn’t get it has a business degree from Harvard, and went to New York to make deals for selling ads on Facebook.

2. Coders can do it faster and better than biz dev or people who cannot code.

Coders code much faster than any “traditional” business arrangement. If you have an idea, and cannot code it, you can never be relevant if you are swinging for the fences. Case in point: The Vinkelvoss twins did have the “idea” for a social network, but so did everybody and their grandma at the time, but execution is very different. Most business folks focus on the idea and the revenue model. The example with Facemash.com in the movie showed that this idea is flawed. Why? Making waves in society with technology will always be faster than a revenue model.

3. Our capacity for having the wisdom to understand the technology we create outstrips the rate at which we create technology.

If this is the case, then the point that the character of Sean Parker pushes throughout the movie, that putting ads on a site is like ending a real cool party at 11 pm, is something all startups swinging for the fences have to take to heart.

EDUARDO: Settle an argument for us, would you? I say it’s time to start making money from TheFacebook but Mark doesn’t want advertising. Who’s right?
SEAN: Neither of you. TheFacebook is cool, that’s what it’s got going for it… You don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool. It’s like you’re throwing the coolest party on campus and someone’s telling you it’s gotta be over at eleven. You don’t even know what the thing is yet.

Great point, Sean. I mean look at what ImDB.com has become because of that ad revenue pop-up model of business. ImDB is so ugly and not cool.

Categories
Social Media TechBiz wordpress

Microsoft moves Blogs to WordPress

At the TechCrunch Disrupt event today, Twitter user, @bigs, broke the news that Microsoft announced that it would be moving over 30 million users of their Live blogging service to WordPress.

As a WordPress expert that has had to work on WordPress in a Windows environment there is one big gotcha: character encoding.

Here are what common characters look like when they are moved from a Windows environment to WordPress:

a return: ^M
single-quotes: ?~@~Y
asterisk: ?~@?
double-quotes: ?~@~\ or ?~@~]

If the WordPress migration process is robust, then it will translate these characters correctly into UTF-8 or something friendly like that.

Live users will definitely welcome the link schema and permalinks on WordPress. Instead of

http://cid-d4909e7f27e254e9.profile.live.com/

a user will get

http://barce.wordpress.com/ .

Also WordPress users can now link their accounts to MSN Messenger so that they can update their MSN friends or co-workers.

Are you a Windows Live Blogging user? How’d your upgrade process go?

Categories
iPhone Dev Social Media WebApps

Dineovore Gives Techies an API

Check out Dinevore if you’re a foodie who is a techie. Their API is now live!

Contact them via twitter or contact their team via email.

Categories
Social Media TechBiz

Have You Used Facebook Places?

Have you used Facebook Places? Do you find it useful? I used it once and didn’t find a need for it, or didn’t get hooked the way I got hooked with Foursqaure.

I have seen interesting interactions by folks who don’t use Foursquare in terms of creating fun pages for a Pho Venue in San Francisco.

That Pho place already has a great Yelp page, but now they’ve got a page on Facebook, too, so it really helps drive more eyeballs onto a business.

Comment below about what you think of Facebook Places.

Categories
Social Media

What is a social media friend?

Aristotle defined 3 kinds of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

  1. friendships of utility
  2. friendships of pleasure
  3. friendships based on the good

Perfect friendship is the friendship of those who are good. — Aristotle

What kind of a friendship is a social media friendship?

At first, a social media friend was merely someone whose name, picture or avatar appeared on one’s profile because that someone had approved a friend request, maybe is someone you met before at a site like, http://chatempanada.com/chat-de-irc-hispano-sala-de-chat-gratis-de-irc-hispano/. However, many people didn’t like the use of “friend” in this way and so they used “follower” and “follows” instead, find more information from a professional like Andy Defrancesco.

Algorithmically, a friend is just a node 1 deep in the B-Tree of life.

Marketing-wise, a friend is just a potential viral link.

From Aristotle’s perspective, a social media friend can be useful (get you a job), be pleasurable (funny comments), and share in some good (charities and fundraising).

Social media extends a very real world practice of seeing and treating people as things, or as means to an end into the on-line world.

This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world. — from “I and Thou” by Martin Buber

Categories
AdSense blogging Social Media TechBiz

How to Triple Your Site Traffic with the 3 Keys of an SEO Blog Post

My website traffic tripled yesterday!

Once again the 3 keys are:
1. Use adwords to tell you which words are expensive.
2. Use the expensive adwords in your post. In this case, “make money with adsense,” is worth $1.50 per click.
3. Blast your social network using something like ping.fm .

Categories
blogging iphone Social Media Webalytics

4 Tools For Blogging on the Go

Great blogging tools make you more efficient. They can also help you drive more traffic to your site.

1 Camera+ brightens up your photos and makes them look so much better. You can share your photos on major social networks.

2 WordPress for the iPhone is a must. I’ve written posts on my iPhone and it’s a great tool. Whatever blogging software you use, make sure you find the one that works with your smart phone!

3 Seesmic for the iPhone allows you to share your blog post created on the go. If you use ping.fm you can share one blog post on linkedin.com, facebook, myspace, friendster, flickr, tumblr, twitter, and bebo in one status update!

4 Once you’ve posted your message, it’s time to study your Google Analytics. The only iPhone app that does this for me is Analytics Apps. At $6.99 it is pricy, but if you’re on the road lots, it’ll start paying for itself.

Categories
blogging Social Media TechBiz

The 3 Keys to a Blog Post with SEO

According to SEO companies like VICTORIOUS, page speed is an essential ranking factor for all websites. So, on how fast your web pages load, will determine how high your SERP rankings will be on Google. Again, here you need to make sure that your web hosting provider isn’t bottlenecking your website where it matters, negatively impacting your SEO efforts. If you need a good hosting service to increase your website speed, you might want to check these wordpress hosting company plans.

This is just an Seo packages for small businesses experiment on how to make money with adsense.

I created a google ad words campaign focusing on what one does to start a blog and make money:

You do not need to know how to create blog software. You should learn more about SEO and its importance before you create your blog as this will help you with customer traffic.

The three keys are:

  1. Sign up for AdWords and create an adwords campaign. Do not run the campaign unless you really want to drive traffic to your site and pay for that. You only want to know which adwords are expensive which means those adwords get searched lots.
  2. Use all the adwords in your blog post. If you look above you’ll see that I did as close to that as I could
  3. Use ping.fm to blast your entire social network with your blog post.

Does it work?

Stay tuned for tomorrow when I publish the results here.

Update on August 20, 2010: I tripled my site traffic just by doing those 3 things above yesterday!

Categories
How-To Social Media TechBiz

How to Get a Good Tech Job

I love this quote from Mark Suster:

“Finding the best jobs takes a lot of commitment to taking many different networking meetings with executives, recruiters, entrepreneurs, VC’s, investment bankers, etc. The best jobs (as you know) are found through personal connections. The best jobs are the ones that have not already been put on a job board. The best jobs are the ones that certainly haven’t gone out to an executive recruiter. The reason these are the “best” jobs for you is that once it goes to an executive recruiter there will be a stack of 100 prospective recruits, 20 amazingly qualified resumes that will have phone or in-person interviews with the recruiter of which the company will meet 5-6. So unless your last job is a mirror image of your next then good luck with those odds.”

Okay, that’s pretty general. What’s a specific example of getting the best job?

A good example is starting out small. Get a reputation for doing quick tech jobs on weekends. This can be anywhere from:

  • writing a basic facebook app, or wordpress plug-in
  • fixing bugs that you are sure you can fix
  • addressing server issues that you are sure you can fix

After a string a little successes like these, you can start taking on bigger jobs.

Recruiters at this point will start knocking at your door. It is not worth it. In my experience, they will fill a position that hasn’t been filled in a long time and with good reason. Also, the fact that your prospective place of work is going through a recruiting agency means 3 things: they are ramping up with hiring and are being quick to hire and slow to fire. There are good reasons not to do this. Another reason is that, they simply cannot recognize talent. If they cannot recognize talent, then they cannot understand you. Misunderstanding is the source of a lot of work grief.

The 3rd thing that it means is that you are walking into a den of Vampires that will take all your soul and talent and feed off of it. You can find the worst Vampires in large corporations and they are usually project managers, or middle management. It is one thing to let a contractor just get the job done, and another thing to take what they do and keep the glory for yourself. These glory hounds, these vampires should be avoided at all costs. They will burn you out.

At this point, be sure to be paying your taxes. You should have a nice little consultancy going. Be disciplined. Don’t be afraid to say, “No.” If something doesn’t feel right, e.g. you sign a contract for PHP work but are doing .NET, then drop them. Yes, drop them. Any person with business sense will understand bait and switch is not the way to think long term.

Two choices will present themselves:

  1. Continue freelancing, or
  2. Focus on one company, e.g. being a co-founder or lead

The first choice makes sense if you are shooting for the 4 hour work week. The second choice makes sense if you are hoping to turn a company in a few years.

If you are going for the 2nd choice, then a few things are key:

  • You need to court this company if they’re a hot commodity. This means hanging out with the devs, the marketers, top-level folks. If you’re really good, they’ll just ask you to go for the interview process. But the best jobs are never listed…. therefore…
  • Use the process to understand the company’s true business needs. From those needs list the ways that you can contribute to the company.
  • From that list, you’ve created your position.

The best job ever is something you create. It is not some laundry list of things someone you don’t know has given you. Your best job ever is your destiny, your meaning of life. Do not settle for less.