Accidentally in Code

Author: Cate

  • A Different Way to Present

    There’s a count down in my head for a presentation I need to give in early September. I’ve been thinking about how I want to do it – I need to show I’m serious about what I’m doing and can be trusted. I’d been thinking about a formal document along the same lines as a business plan and a Keynote presentation. Which seemed a little too formal, but I definitely want to err on the side of too formal. Then I came across this idea by Seth Godin.

    Read it. I think it’s a phenomenal idea and moreover – it’s exactly what I was looking for.

  • iTunes Store Optimization?

    MobileCrunch has an interesting article about the dodgy tactics of a PR firm promoting iPhone apps. The thrust of it is that this company (Reverb) has, as part of the strategy they advertise to customers, been having interns post reviews of apps submitted to the store and also around the web.

    These tactics have something familiar about them – they’re similar to the kind of things that are used by dodgy SEO companies. It’s like the proprietors that post glowing reviews of their own hotel, or restaurant. Like the person on Twitter that automatically follows and unfollows people to get the maximum follower count.

    The web is a popularity contest. We want it to be a meritocracy – where the best content wins – but the sad fact of it is that sometimes, maybe often, the most popular content wins. The most popular content will hopefully be the best content, but when people are gaming the system – we can’t be sure.

    For instance, I just searched “evolution vs creation” and top hit is from allaboutcreation.org. I’m not a biologist, but I am fairly confident that this isn’t the best resource available on the web. Extract below:

    Evolution vs. Creation is indeed the Great Debate of our scientific times. In any scientific debate, the theories must be tested according to the evidence. We propose that the burden of evidence should be upon the Evolutionists, since Creation has been the historic and inherent default throughout virtually all cultures and religions until roughly the last 200 years.

    There’s more here. I took this search from Google’s suggested searches after typing in evolution; sadly it’s possible to be confident that although the science in support of evolution is solid there are enough people who vocally disagree that I thought something like this would rank highly – number 1 was a surprise though! However it illustrates the point I’m trying to make – Wikipedia (number 3, I promoted it for my results though) is likely a better resource. And yet it’s not number 1 – probably because the other one is more popular.

    SEO, and apparently PR firms make a living trying to game the system, artificially inflate the popularity of their clients. The example above is irritating, but is at least organically popular. And it’s a shame, because popularity is often a fantastic indication of what’s better. But when it’s not – how do we tell? If it’s something we know about, then maybe we can make a good guess. But say I’m trying to find the best place to buy ski boots in Ottawa, or the best sushi restaurant downtown – I’m relying on popularity to help me make that decision, and I want it to be real, not fake.

    This is why Personal Recommendations will be so important, I guess. I’m reading the Social Network Business Plan at the moment, and whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, I guess on this – he has a point.

    Related: Good to see – highly ranking when you search for “Search Engine Optimization” is advice from Google – listing aspects of SEO that are useful and suggesting you make sure you know what you SEO is doing, with some examples of dodgy practices. bMighty has an article on How to Hire An SEO Company. And, in support of Why (I think) SEO is a Load of Crap, a lawsuit for an SEO company that made infeasible promises from the Seattle Times.

    Edit: article on engagement – 11 Things More Valuable Besides Clicks and Conversions.

  • I Don’t Have Impostor Syndrome

    I almost feel like I shouldn’t admit this – it’s something all grad students are supposed to have (as far as I can make out), I had a talk about it in my first week and it’s come up since then too. I’m not belittling it, and I know it’s something a lot of grad students do suffer from, and it’s really horrible.

    I know it’s really horrible, because I used to have impostor syndrome. And, don’t get me wrong, I still get feelings of crushing inadequacy. But – I don’t feel that I don’t deserve to be at grad school.

    Yesterday, I was in a talk. There were about 40-50 people there. I was the only woman. This is situation normal in CS. Well, a little below normal – usually there’s one or two other women. I asked a question, there was an acronym I didn’t understand – SWEBOK, and I was told I should know what it was. A show of hands revealed that I was not (by far) the only one – when I got a chance to Google it later it turns out that it’s what you should know after working in Software Engineering for 4 years.

    Anyway, I don’t let that kind of thing make me feel bad about myself anymore. I looked up what it was, and I won’t need to ask that question again. I no longer think having those questions is a sign of weakness.

    So I used to have impostor syndrome. It used to bother me that I’d be the only girl in my group, one of few in my class. I used to get really angry because I felt that I needed to work twice as hard to get the respect of my peers. I used to get even angrier when I realized that wouldn’t win me the respect of all of them. And I used to think that I needed to give up part of who I am (the part of me that likes to put on makeup, consider my outfit choice, make time to go outside and to exercise) in order to be a geek, and that to be good at CS I would need to be a geek.

    But I don’t care anymore. Being one of few women means that I’m less intimidated to speak to the other women that are there, and I’ve interacted with and met some cool people this way. Working twice as hard may not have got me the respect of everyone, but it got me the respect of those I respect in return – much more valuable, in my opinion. And it got me a good degree from the University of Edinburgh, into grad school here in Ottawa, and a good GPA. It’s got me valuable work experience, and a work ethic that will help me when I venture into industry (and learn the SWEBOK). I think that the way the industry is going, not being a geek will in fact work to my advantage.

    Working recently, there was some sexism going on. Shamefully, the worst of it was from another woman. But so what? She was only holding herself back, not me – it’s irritating, sure, but I’m not going to get worked up about it. When my expertise is overlooked because my boss thinks the guy must be smarter it grates, sure, but if I have some insight, it’s not me that’s missing out – it’s the people who didn’t think I was worth listening too. Ultimately, this attitude of negating half the population (in fact, more than half their employees) will hold their business back, not me.

    It’s taken a while, but I’m not an impostor in grad school, and I’m not an impostor in my field. And the biggest reason as to why? Because I’ve built up a network of people who respect me, who rate who I am and what I do. People I met through my degree, along the winding path that took me here to uOttawa, and here as well.

    At the moment, I’m working really hard with the rest of the exec committee to get a chapter of Women in Science and Engineering going at uOttawa. Carleton have made a big success of CU:WISE and I hope we can emulate that. We’ll be running a lot of outreach, but what I’m most excited about is building a community where Women in Science and Engineering can get together, build their support network, and eventually say, “I Don’t Have Impostor Syndrome, Either”.

  • Facebook Lite

    I’m quite excited about this, it’s being talked up in the press as a way for people with slow connections to access the site, but having recently been living somewhere where the internet was heavily censored, I’m more excited that accessing Facebook through a proxy site will be easier and a better experience.

  • “Marketing Experts” on Twitter

    There was a point on Twitter where it seemed like every day I’d check my email and discover that I’d been followed by yet another “Marketing Expert”. I had to wonder how many there were…

    WeFollow was the obvious way to do this. So I made my way through the list, hacked some URLs and I have a number.

    17,450

    Seventeen thousand, four hundred and fifty. Seriously, check out this link. By the time you read this, there’ll likely be more. Crikey! Not saying all these people try and sell themselves as “marketing experts”, and these are obviously only those with the nous to register on WeFollow. But still. If we estimate the number of people on Twitter to be 1 million, 1.745% of the people on Twitter are in “Marketing”. They range from 0 followers to 997,354. The person in the middle (Number 8725) has 244. So there’s a power law graph going on here with the long tail graph. The first 3765 have over 1000 followers.

    Actually, that’s kind of less than I expected. So, good to know that Twitter isn’t made up mostly of people in Marketing. Adds to it’s appeal, for me at least. WeFollow is an interesting resource, I wish they had an API…

  • Why SEO is a Load of Crap

    A blogger I read, wrote this post commenting on SEO. I suggest you read it, because it’s good, but in brief the question she’s asking is – what is SEO? Why isn’t blogging about content? I commented on her post, but I think my thoughts on SEO merit their own little forum. So here we go!

    Blogging is all about creating content, it’s one of the many reasons having a “company blog” is so good. It provides an easy way of regularly updating your site, which determines how regularly Google crawls it. Even if you accept a niche for SEO, would it apply well to blogging? Do you try and optimize every post? Or just your homepage? How do you divide your time? Should you be spending as much time optimizing your post for search as you do writing? It doesn’t really make sense to me. I don’t think that blogging great content will necessarily get people to your site, but I’m pretty confident that blogging mediocre content but spending a lot of time ensuring it still ranks well in search won’t get you a lot of people subscribing to your RSS feed. Are you supposed to measure your worth in hits, or the number of people who engage with your content, comment, respond to stuff you’ve written, pass it along to their friends?

    So one way to do “SEO” is to go around commenting on things related to what you’re doing and include a link to your site. This has a dual goal – one of getting people to click on the link (more hits) but from the SEO perspective each link out there is a “vote” for your site, and the more votes you have the better your search ranking. There’s a spammer equivalent of this, which writing a bot to post all over the place (WordPress does an excellent job of stopping that kind of thing). And there’s a smart way to do it, which is to join in the conversation on a few things and prove you’ve got something worthwhile to say. Then the fact that a lot of sites use a nofollow tag won’t matter as people will be looking at your site to see who the person with the insightful comments is, and perhaps linking to you in a future post. Twitter uses the nofollow tag, so including the URL of my blog in my profile makes no difference to my page rank. But it’s still a good idea to include it – I’m taking part in the conversation, and if people want to find out who I am or what I do – they can.

    My degree is in Computer Science and I took a course on how search engines work. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I know enough that when I hear people talking about SEO it’s often apparent that they don’t know how search engines work. No-one outside of Google knows exactly how their search engine works, but there are a couple of things we do know – first is that content IS important, because the ranking is a combination of popularity and content. Having people link to you is good, but reciprocal links are ignored. The more popular something that links to you is, the more that boosts your ranking, etc.

    Ultimately, I think SEO is not and cannot be a long term strategy. Firstly, because people find ways to make SEO tactics less effective – the no follow tag is an example of this, and a long time ago Google stopped considering “keywords”, and some time in between invisible text got left out too. And secondly because every year the search experience gets better and the current movement is to make it more personalized, but there’s also a lot of data about how everyone is using the web. So there are a lot of improvements we can reasonably expect to see, and soon.

    I know! It’s harder! It’s a longer term strategy. And ohhh you went to so much effort to make your website. So what! Doesn’t mean you deserve a top ranking in Google right away. Looking at SEO this way, it’s apparent that SEO means trying to approximate the way people get a well respected site (with a good page rank), cheaply and quickly.

    And, by the way, the only person I know who makes any money from Google works for them. Those ads about making money using Google? They’re a load of nonsense too. Great article on that here.

    Finally, and most importantly, I think SEO misses the point of having a website. You don’t create one to interact with Google – you create one to interact with customers, potential customers, potential employees, partners, potential partners. So even if you can get these people to your site by artificially inflating your ranking, your content determines whether they’ll come back. There’s some new and cool ways to measure “engagement” with a site, such as seeing what people have highlighted, cut and paste etc. So as those kind of metrics become more mainstream the old metric of “hits” will seem like the blunt tool it is.

    So here’s where I see SEO ending. I think that sometime soon Google’s algorithm will be smart enough to tell the difference between people trying to simulate respected content and people having respected content. And sometime around then, the effort people go to to simulate respected content will exceed the effort needed to have respected content. And after SEO, will come something that I’m describing “Web Strategizing”. This will mean thinking about the entirety of your presence on the web, what social media is appropriate and can best represent your brand. You probably should be blogging, but what should you be blogging about? How do you engage your community? Who is your community, anyway?

    Here’s why I think “Web Strategy” is the way – it’s because when I talk to people, they might say they want to rank higher in Google but that’s not their only goal. And they have other questions about how the web works, too, that SEO doesn’t answer. There are a few conversations I’ve had relatively recently, and I’ll talk about them below.

    • Talking to a consultant  about Facebook. A company he advises is thinking about their Facebook strategy, and how best to use the platform to promote themselves. He asked my opinion, and amongst other things I talked about Privacy concerns on Facebook. Why? I don’t talk about Privacy concerns to everyone who asks me this, but because given the business model of the company concerned Privacy is a crucial thing to address.
    • Small business owner, also on Facebook. Wants to use it as a marketing tool. Has some good ideas, some distinctly half baked. I told him – Facebook complements your online strategy, it doesn’t replace it.
    • Small business owner, on his website in general. He’s fired a web designer because they were being flaky, but anyway isn’t convinced they were doing what he wanted. He’s computer literate, but not that technical and wants to be able to update it himself. Blogging is an obvious part of the solution here, but Twitter is also going to be part of the strategy – I’ll keep you posted.
    • Analyst asked me to look at a site for specialized search. The usability was really appalling. If you’re going to out-Google Google, you’re going to need to bring something new and more impressive to the table.
    • Conversation with director of a small multi-national. They’ve hired someone to do a much needed redesign of their website and also to improve their Google ranking. I talked to him about some of the more spam-like SEO strategies and what doesn’t actually work and he was keen to make sure that none of those tactics were used. Also, they’re not so interested in their search rank, it’s more about leveraging the contacts they have – so having more of a presence on LinkedIn would be a good thing for them.

    Conclusion – none of these tools are magic. But they’re incredibly powerful, if you understand them. Being “on the internet” is not a business plan. What do you want to portray in your web presence? What do you hope to get from it? How do you plan to monetize that, and if you don’t plan to – how can you measure the value that you get? Facebook is the fourth largest site in the world, but isn’t profitable. Why? Because they didn’t start with a business model, although perhaps that’s part of the reason why they’ve been so successful. What they do have, is content which will eventually be incredibly valuable – once they work out how to monetize it without annoying their users too much. And they’re being patient.

    The only site I saw making money out of SEO was one that charged $10 and redirected you to OpenOffice. But when I tried to find it just now, I couldn’t. Go figure! So SEO? Not a long term strategy.

  • Art, Life, and Programming

    This December, the University of Ottawa is holding some events to get children (7-10) interested in Engineering and Computer Science. I got the email and was inspired, because this is something I do.

    My full CV is on my LinkedIn, but suffice to say the past 3 summers I’ve been teaching programming to kids. 2007 in St Paul (Minnesota), 2008 in St Paul and Seattle, and this past summer in Shanghai. I’ve also worked on the Java curriculum that was taught across the US (and that I taught in Shanghai). I’ve done this rather than take better paid jobs, or internships, and I’m not 100% sure why. But here’s why I think I do it…

    Programming is seen as boring, 1’s and 0’s. It’s not as exciting as making a website, or a video game. But – talented programmers are how the applications we use to make websites and video games are made in the first place. When we use an application, we’re limited by what the application designer thought we would want. But when we code, we’re limited by the speed of our computer, the size of the memory… and our own imagination. Bear in mind, the first two limitations get less limiting by the 18 months (says Moore’s law).

    I find that really inspiring. And, if I take that mindset and look at the things I do, day to day, hardware designers and programmers have changed everything. Here’s some of what I’m interested in: usability, search engines, social networking, programming as art… OK, computers have been about for a while, but if I were 10 years older? I never would have made it in Computer Science. It would have been too much about the hardware, for me. There’s a long story as to how I wound up in CS, but the short story is – it was kind of an accident. But there was enough there that I liked to keep me at it, and I doubt that would have been the case 10 years earlier. And now – I love it. I love to code, I love what I do. Seriously, I’ll talk about it to anyone who’ll listen. I’m excited to explain it to people who aren’t techies, because I’m excited that we’re finally getting there – where the stuff programmers create in their darkened basements is something real people use, and could even understand if we would just take the time to explain it to them without using obscure acronyms and unexplained concepts. I’m excited by the fact we don’t need to live in darkened basements anymore, too.

    So, my theory in teaching is – learning to code, the constructs, thinking logically… can be pretty dull. But what we can create is really exciting. So I focus less on constructs, more on possibility. I talk about Open Source, and the browser wars, extreme programming, and I create stuff. And I make sure that every child I teach has the option to go home with something graphical. This year, we used processing and it was awesome. We made fractals, block breaker, snake (like the game on the Nokia phones), tetris, and a game the student called “dodgeball” (I’ll put these all up when I get my website done). And this was on top of the “frameworks” I’d created in the curriculum – hangman, noughts and crosses, blackjack, and Pacman, which were done using Swing. Frameworks mean the GUI was done for the student, and they fill in the Logic.

    So, back to the presentation. I’ve uploaded the slides here, so please take a look (and let me know what you think – first draft). It’s supposed to last an hour to an hour and a half.

    My Presentation centers around 3 Themes: Art, Life, and Programming.

    Theme 1: ART

    Art is no longer just paintings, or sculptures, or even photographs. Technology has given us new mediums to create with, and new means to distribute. Code is like a paintbrush, and the internet is the worlds biggest art gallery.

    Examples

    • The Twitter “Fail Whale” – an example of how a popular web service can make an image iconic. The “Fail Whale” now has it’s own range of memorabilia – have a look here.
    • We Tell Stories – a digital literature project. 6 authors, 6 stories, each given a new form using the internet. You can follow the story of 21 steps through Google Maps, but my personal favorite is Fairy Tales where you can control how the story goes.
    • One and Other – an installation, or “living monument”. For 100 days, one person every hour spends their time at the top of the plinth doing whatever they want. Broadcast over the internet, it’s attracted millions of page views and hits from around the world.
    • New Yorker cover in May drawn using the iPhone application Brushes.
    • PostSecret – a community mail art project. People send in post cards of their secrets, which are then posted on a blog each week. A mix of old and new technology. Running since 2005, the 5th book is shortly to be released and thousands of secrets have been posted online.
    • Pixel City – a YouTube video of the creation of an entirely computer generated city.
    • I Want You To Want Me – an interactive installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York created by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris. It pulls data from dating sites, and displays it in different ways. Visually stunning, and profound it “explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating”.

    These tools are recent.

    Fractal – Art, or Math? Or both?

    Theme 2: LIFE

    Inventions that have changed humanity: the printing press, electricity, the combustion engine, fire…

    Computers and the Internet are another such invention, and we’re living through the period of change. Who knows what 2010 was like? Parents upbringing would be unrecognizable to the way we live now.

    In the West, people aged 30 and under are the first generation to grow up with the internet being “normal”, and everywhere. This gives us a significant advantage in the 21st century. However, less than 24 people in every 100 worldwide have access to the internet, which was only invented in 1989. Much information – medical records are a good example, is not yet digital.

    Blogging is a new medium, the Blogger service was launched in 1999, and bought by Google in 2003. Services like this made it possible for not techies to “blog” (previously, blogs were just websites which required more knowledge to create). The concept of sharing your every day life in public, as it happened was new. Now, Blogging is also used as a way to communicate with your customers – important announcements are made on the company blog (Google is a great example of this).

    Blogging may have been the start of the concept of “ambient intimacy”, where people stay connected by following each others lives on the internet, rather than through active communication. It’s also something that newspapers see as a threat to their business model.

    Newspapers: Prediction, the paper version will be obsolete, and soon. Why? Because the way we live is changing, because their business model has been undermined by services like CraigsList. Because the world will be different in 5 years than it is now, and a lot different from how it was 10 years ago.

    What’s Next? Google Wave, the Apple tablet computer, table computing, house-cleaning robots… and other things we haven’t imagined yet.

    Theme 3: PROGRAMMING

    People used to program using 1’s and 0’s. A card with holes punched into it, that you’d insert into a computer (when it was your turn) and wait for the result to come out the other end. We’ve come a long way since then, and can code visually using things like Alice (upcoming 3.0 release uses The Sims) and the Warcraft World editor. Often, though, we use something in between such as C#, Haskell, or Java.

    Remember the fractal? It’s Java – created using Processing.

    Conclusions

    • Technology has changed our lives considerably relatively recently
    • New and impressive “hardware”
    • Creative and innovating programming
    • More to come!
    • Technologists – hardware designers, programmers – are at the center of what we will achieve next

    Final Thoughts

    • Look around – changes are happening rapidly
    • In 15 years, you could be talking about what’s happened in your lifetime
    • Be inspired! Human innovation is INCREDIBLE!
    • Push boundaries! Be limited only by your imagination.
    • Experiment!

  • Spammers Getting Creative

    This morning I found a spammer who I actually have a grudging admiration for. They’ve been a little more creative than posting a headless picture of a young (hot) girl or mass following anyone who mentions whatever they’re pushing in the hope they follow them back.

    Check them out: http://twitter.com/SkiClubs

    At the moment of writing they have 491 followers (to the 640 they are following). Twanalyst, a service I find very useful tells me:

    Tweets per day: 8.5
    Readability index: (?) 18
    % conversations: 3
    % links: 96
    % hashtags: 1

    Personality: popular obsessive cautious
    Style: garrulous academic
    ROBOT

    So there’s actually a website about skiing linked to from their profile, which doesn’t try to sell anything and has some content. Not a huge amount, but enough to appear legitimate from a casual glance – maybe it is, even. A nice background and a profile picture.

    But let’s take a look at their ten most recent tweets…

    Tweet 1
    Tweet 1
    Tweet 2
    Tweet 2
    Tweet 3
    Tweet 3
    Tweet 4
    Tweet 4
    Tweet 5
    Tweet 5
    Tweet 6
    Tweet 6
    Tweet 7
    Tweet 7
    Tweet 8
    Tweet 8
    Tweet 9
    Tweet 9
    Tweet 10
    Tweet 10

    So here’s what I think is impressive (for a spammer):

    1. There’s content that looks legitimate.
    2. 357 Tweets so this is someone who has some history.
    3. Some of the content is actually interesting, I would love to know what “Skwittering” is!
    4. It’s targeted. (They likely added me because in my profile it lists “ski instructor”)

    Here’s what makes me say it’s spam:

    1. Anything which contains anything about “making money”
    2. Same “money making tweet repeated twice (tweets 2 and 8 )
    3. Almost all content links link to the homepage of the website. It suggests there’s content, an article or a blogpost – but there isn’t. So I still don’t know what “Skwittering” is…
    4. The content links as well are recycled. If you go back further through their tweets, there are multiple of the same of those as well.

    Here’s what I would love to know:

    1. Did they make the ski website themselves or is it one they found? How much effort are they actually going to here?
    2. What’s the click-through rate?
    3. Are there multiple areas which are targeted? I.e. are they running a “rock climbing” twitter and website as well.
    4. Do they actually ski?

  • Spam

    I spend a lot of time thinking about Spam. It may be an inherent danger of being a Programmer. Even though I take care of my email address not being posted around the internet I get junk mail. Some of it is quite funny, although I hear some people fall for the bank with unclaimed money in Nigeria… so I guess not for them.

    I bet back in the day people said that spam would ruin email, and I don’t mean to negate it as I know spam costs companies a lot in lost time and productivity. But I think Spam on Twitter and Facebook is even more interesting.

    Take Facebook. The primary source of spam for me on Facebook is Facebook Applications, that send me notifications inviting me to add things I have no interest in and frankly don’t want accessing my personal information to my profile. I definitely consider those to be spam, and block any that I receive. On the rare occasion that I do consider adding an application, asking me to notify some / all my friends will immediately cause me to change my mind. But – many of my friends who I’ve actively acknowledged a relationship with clearly don’t consider these aps to be Spam, as they add them to their profile.

    Maybe this is similar to email. After all, whilst the vast majority of people consider invitations to buy Viagra online, or contact from a bank manager in Nigeria to be spam sufficiently many people respond that it’s worth the cost to the spammer of harvesting email addresses and buying the bandwidth to send the spam out. I think the difference is, I don’t personally know anyone who buys Viagra in response to an email or really believes that they’ll get thousands of pounds out of Nigeria. So the response rate for spam on Facebook is higher? Or one person’s spam is another person’s… ham?

    However spam on Facebook doesn’t (thus far) have the power to ruin the whole experience. And since the Facebook applications are now old news, I definitely get fewer notifications. Twitter though – is different.

    Twitter has the issues of Facebook and of email. You can get spammed by people you follow (like you can get spammed by people you’re friends with on Facebook – the Spymaster game springs to mind) and you can get spammed by people you don’t. There’s an intereting article on Twitter spam here. But the real way that spam annoys me on Twitter is because it takes over every trending topic. So, in an unscientific study I checked the trending topics a little after 19:00 BST today, and counted how much was people just including the topic to get their post showing up in searches for it.

    Trending Topic # of Spam Posts % Spam
    Follow Friday 0 0
    #whentwitterwasdown 1 5
    #welovekevinjonas 2 10
    #flywithme 4 20
    GI Joe 2 10
    RIP John Hughes 3 15
    #tls09 8 40
    UberTwitter 6 30
    TGIF 4 20
    #IranElection 0 0
    Average 3 15

    So there’s an average of 15% spam, which is lower than I expected (clearly things have improved since this article) but still – some trends are as high as 40%. I want to say – really, does anyone fall for this… but clearly like all spam enough people do for it to be worth the very low overhead for spammers to do it. One of the coolest things about Twitter is it’s ability to capture the zeitgeist, and trending topics being full of spam damages this.

    Another thing I consider to be spam is pyramid follower schemes. You know the ones, you follow everyone and give them your details and it spams your followers with the link and adds you to the list, so the next idiot follows you. I’ve un-followed two people (doesn’t sound like much, but I only follow about 50-60 people) for using these. I loathe them – and there are so many! I’ve been keeping track of the ones that come up and (these are just those that I’ve made a note of) have a list of 13 since June. They have such inventive names as: “Twitter Train”, “TweeterPro”, “GatherFollowers”, “BestFollowers”, “FollowersFast”, “QuickFollowers”, “ThousandFollowers”, “EasyFollowers”, “FollowersFree”, “AddFollowers”, “MaxFollows” and they all look the same, and all have the “VIP” option – which is how they make money. Really? People pay to spam the followers they have in the hope of getting more followers who are only following them in order to get more followers themselves? Really?!

    Great article which highlights the stupidity of such schemes and that the best way to “grow your follower count” is organically, by interacting and treating Twitter as a conversation medium not a broadcast medium is this one. For people wanting to run a live Twitter stream on their website, spam in the search results is a real issue. TidyTweet aims to minimize this (and take out inappropriate language as well). Whilst there have been a plethora of “make money on Google” links lately, even legitimate companies have been guilty of spamming, so I can’t see there being an easy fix. And, when this kind of promotion makes it into the trending topics I wonder where we draw the line between what’s spam and what’s just an aggressive and questionably honest marketing strategy.

    Unwanted @ messages are another form of spam that’s pretty common, although Twitter seems to be clamping down. This morning I had a RT that I never tweeted in the first place, but by this afternoon it (and presumably the person who sent it) was gone.

    Finally, Bot’s that follow you because of keywords or just because in the hope that you follow them back and click on their links are the things that annoy me most. Apparently it’s grounds for account suspension, however I haven’t noticed much effect on the number of times I get added by accounts following this strategy. I’ll have to write another post just about this, because this one is already too long. Briefly, for the past 2 months I’ve been tracking who follows me, if I suspect they used a keyword, and whether or not I followed them back. Since the start of June, 120 people have followed me. If you check out the number of people I follow, it’s apparent that I haven’t followed a fraction of them back. I’m also not being followed by much over 100 people, so clearly they haven’t kept following me! They often give you 24 hours to follow them back, and then unfollow you in order to maintain their ratio. In fact, 120 is inaccurate because this contains the same account following me 3 times!  Of this 120, 3 I was already following (when they followed me), and I followed 21, 3 of whom I later unfollowed. So 80% of the follower notifications I received I did not consider to be worth following back.  This article demonstrates an extreme example of this. That’s a pretty high rate of spam. If you’ve been following everyone who follows you back, there is something you can use to get rid of them – mashable has a good article on this.

    Of course these are just ongoing issues I have with spam on Twitter. There have also been isolated incidents, like when loads of legitimate accounts were hijacked, or fake celebrity re-tweets. Twitter is also definitely trying to minimize the issues of spam, although with mixed results, such as blocking bad URLS, and suspending accounts. But with the rise of sponsored tweets, such as this service it may get more complicated.