What is All This #journchat HashTag Madness Anyway?
Last night, like many others, I stumbled upon the HastTag #journchat during my evening stay at the Twitterinn. The first thing that was clear among all these common Tweets was they were all motioning you over to TweetGrid or something similar. A viral ploy perhaps, But an obvious need to help filter and keep up with the flow of these messages tagged with #journchat.
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol. You commonly find a rush of these tags for breaking news, events, or even conventions which people are attending.
The #journchat hashTag was created specifically for PR and Journalism professionals in, what appears to be, an effort of having a virtual conference or seminar of sorts.
Another thing was quite certain after looking at the Tweet Stream for the HashTag, many were confused!
At any rate, the concept is intriguing. However, is using a HashTag to conduct a ‘chat’ or virtual seminar really the best way to approach this? I think it just might be!
Many conferences these days are now live streaming their events to the interwebs with sites and services like UStream. You’ll see these chat streams QUICKLY fill up with people ‘virtually’ attending and looking to connect with others interested in the event. The #journchat concept is very closely related to this, just without the physical event happening.
But just like any Marketing/PR event, you start to draw a lot of riff-raff and the message gets distorted. It may be too early call this one, but I am seeing what appears to be people just looking to gain followers.
A Motion for TinyURL Boycott on Twitter
Today, after seeing several prominent Social Media figures Twitter status updates using the TinyURL shortener service, I decided to motion for a TinyURL Boycott on Twitter.
Issue #1
Users unaware of more robust URL shortener services and the advantages they provide.
As we engage in social media, an important factor to understanding our ROI (how ever you may measure your return) is learning how to gather information so that you may apply traditional analytics. By now you should be VERY familiar with website traffic statistics and how to measure those critical data points to gain insight into your websites traffic, right? You’ve likely even hammered someone youself on their websites number of Unique Visitors, Pageview, Referring Sites, or Keyword Referrals. This is crucial information both for internal digestion and external comprehension of a websites performance.
I’ll let you in on a little secret (its not really a secret but play along), you can measure some of these very same things with those silly links you are sharing via your social media indulgences! There are actually a few services that provide this type of information. Guess which commonly used shortener is NOT in the list? However, analytical data for your shortened URL’s is essentially the opposite of what you may be accustomed to. Shortened URL data points are via outbound links whereas normal website data points are usually drawn from inbound links. If your brain is starting to hurt, dont worry its really not that complicated 
Issue #2
The Twitter service itself automatically utilizing an inferior URL shortener service.
Another interesting twist to this is that many users posting TinyURL’s Shortened links may actually not even be aware of this! Twitter, to preserve its valuable 140chars of tweetscape, actually auto invokes the TinyURL service behind the scenes to shorten URL’s in user status updates.
Twitter Support > FAQ > Why Does Twitter use TinyURL?
Does Twitter allow html in web updates?
No. We escape all html for security purposes. However, if you paste in a link that is less than 30 characters, we’ll post it in its entirety. If it’s longer than 30 characters, we’ll convert it to a tiny URL.Why does Twitter use tiny URL?
Tiny is tidy! Tiny URL takes long, ugly, 30+ characters links with an obscene amount of punctuation, such as ? or &, and converts them to slim, trim, tidy, pretty, Twitter links that mesh well with our 140 character limit.
I’m not sure this FAQ really answers the questions at hand: “Why does Twitter use TinyURL“.
Put a little Analytics in your Shortener
So, you’re ready to shorten your URL’s like the kewl kids and start gaining those rich insights into your shared links? GOOD! Lucky for you there are a few good choices, here are my personal top 3:
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Bit.ly- Organize all your Bit.ly URL’s into a single account |
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BudUrl- Inbound links redirect with a 307 for maximum SEO performance |
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TweetBurner- Organize all your Bit.ly URL’s into a single account |
Of course, I could hardly scratch the surface on all the URL Shorteners out there but hopefully just sharing my top3 will get you trying some new things. If interested, Chris Messina has put together a, beyond impressive, list of URL Shortener services via pictures of the various services. This is going to blow your mind Im sure, the list is out of control, and again probably doesn’t cover them all!
I am currently hooked on Bit.ly, both for its embracing links from a social media perspective and my ability to consume its API. To give you some insight to this information, here are a few screenshots from the data provided on one of my shortened URLs:
Allows you to see other Twitter Users who have shortened this same base URL, or perhapse those who have ReTweeted your shortened URL. The above shows myself as the 3rd Twitter User to shortened the base URL, along with my twitter status update.
Traffic sources lends visibility on social media click trends both on your shortened URL as well as Total Traffic for shortened URL’s via Bit.ly for your Base URL.
What kind of analytics would we have if there were no pretty graphs and charts?
So, now that I feel better having gotten this TinyURL rant off my chest, have I converted any TinyURL users?
I leave you with three questions:
- Why does Twitter use TinyURL over other services?
- Why are you using TinyURL still?
- Are you down with the Boycott?
Confirmed: iPhone Now Comes With Free WiFi At All AT&T Hotspots
If you own an AT&T iPhone, you now get free WiFi access at AT&Ts 17,000 hotspots across the country, including at most Starbucks. When I first heard this I was skeptical due to last years teaser by AT&T. However, tonight I confirmed the news… Its Free!
The following three screen shots from my iPhone tonight show the simple 3 step process. You’re still challenged with the Wifi Hotspot login, but this time you REALLY DONT need an account. Just enter in your AT&T phone number, click submit. You’re then displayed a screen stating a free text message is about to be sent to your phone.
A Message to the Recording Industry: Physical vs Stream
Stuck in traffic this morning, listening to Pandora on my iPhone, I reflected on my reaching out to Justin @Muxtape with his recent online message regarding the service shutdown by the RIAA. Ive always been a forward thinker, so logically I went straight to the potential key in this well debated and controversial issue on copyrighted infringement: Physical vs Stream.
Think about it, What drives music piracy and terrifies the mighty Titans of Hollywood’s entertainment industry?
Did you answer physical files or products? No, Why not?….
Widespread copyright infringement, or piracy, is about the ease of creating and sharing mp3’s. Consumer’s need mp3’s to enjoy his/her digital device (ie iPhone/iPod/Zune/ect). Online music retailers fuel the need as both businesses and Major record companies alike try to control the use of files. This includes authorized services such as eMusic, Rhapsody, Amazon.com, and Napster.
If the Recording Industry wants to regain its footing then, in my opinion, it needs to start thinking ahead and embracing companies like Pandora and Muxtape. Mp3’s are fading from the forefront characteristic of the Internet as cloud computing begins to shift our everyday lives.
I’ll give you an example, I own a 16GB iPhone which contains ZERO mp3 files. Why do I need mp3’s when I can stream them from the internet via services such as Pandora and Last.fm? Sure you can toss reasons as to why having the digital files is better than streaming, but at the end of the day why cant streaming be better than digital files?
If the Recording Industry, and RIAA, adopted cloud music services today would this put them in a better position tomorrow? Yes! - Case in point, Napster.
If the Recording Industry positioned itself properly could those feeding the consumer physical music addition (ie: mp3s & digital devices) be shut down? Why not!
Its time the Recording Industry & RIAA got off their asses and flipped the script. Take the power back. They need to remove themselves from a combative stance and start focusing resources on developing the new. If the physical dependency can be removed, shifting to streaming content, the who needs mp3’s or even cd’s? Not me!
This message was brought to you by: My morning drive to work.
More information:
- The Napster Controversy (start to finish)
- DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- History of Mp3’s Wikipedia
- How To: Live the Cloud Life by Paul Stamatious
- Cloud Computing Wikipedia
Hello My Name is (E)XPLOIT
Today a new service hit the twitter radar as users began sending tweets stating: “I’m now using E to add friends to my Twitter account. More info on http://hellomynameise.com” - myself included! I promptly sent them an @reply on twitter & also in hope that my Tweeple would catch wind of this:
The sites goal is to “integrate your social services and make sure you can share your online identities in real life.” So far, the site/service has managed to receive a prompt back lash due to their immediately trust abuse! Newly obtained members began sending the above twitter status update upon adding their twitter profile as a ’service’ or ‘identity’ to the site.
Performing another quick Summize search turns up some angry Tweeple, and rightfully so:
As predicted, they promptly responded to the issue with a Blog Post simply titled ‘Auto Tweet’:
The auto tweet function was something we implemented to test Twitter service integration. A lot of people liked to share their E usage over Twitter, but we decided to take it out after complaints. It might return as an option. Post your feature requests, feedback and rants to the Feedback pane in E or use Get Satisfaction!
“…implemented to test Twitter service integration” - Really? How professional of you.
At the end of the day I think this is an excellent example to those attempting to leverage site and service API’s as integral components to 3rd party applications. More over, don’t be stupid.
Ironicly, this also touches on my blog post from yesterday, Social Media Reach and The Sphere of Influence, as the clear goal in this exploit was to gain members via each users ‘Social Media Reach’ as they added the service and caused a ripple effect through their followers. As we have learned, this is an example of Reach With Evil Intention!
Upon further review and testing the service I discovered what I feel is a fatal flaw: Your ‘e-ID’ is not a unique personal ID but a random numerical ‘code’ you must hand out per contact trade. It would be much more friendly to have a personal ‘e-ID’ assigned value/code/id for each ‘e’ user. This will enable users to ’share’ their e-ID much like you would share, say, your ICQ number. You can easily memorize an ID and just hand it out.
I posted a GetSatisfaction inquiry on this:
