This particular user caught my attention immediatly, and not just her easy on the eyes avatar! She actually hosts a weekly video series that reviews top discussed items on Twitter. This, as you might guess, is right up my alley! Of course I never knew she even existed until she initiated this friendship on Twitter.

I promptly pulled up my favorite desktop Twitter Client, twhirl, and sent her a DM (direct message) to let her know the video series concept was very cool. To my amazement, she was no longer following me! I then pulled up TweepleTwak (Disclaimer: its my site) to confirm our Friendship or lack there of. Sure enough, she had stopped following me within minutes of recieving that follow notification that started all of this.

I was honestly not suprised as this sort of thing is rather common on Twitter, but I decided to go ahead and setup a twak through TweepleTwak. Since TweepleTwak actually monitors, or twaks, follower and following relationships I can see if my hunch was correct. Just how badly was she abusing those that reciprecate friendships on twitter, if at all. This was 5days ago as of today, and Ive since gathered some very interesting data on her ‘follow/un-follow’ patterns. 

TweepleTwak’s functionality and actual analytics have really grown rapidly as its original concept was to simply track your own lost followers. Now Ive also discovered an interesting metric within a users ‘un-follows’. While our Twitter user in question stopped following 746 people on the second day I started tracking them, they lost just 17 followers total all 5days of the track. The un-followings the next few days were less dramatic with 92 un-follows the third day, 54 the fourth day, and 58 the fifth day. 

There’s a lot of buzz right now instructing you to “not worry about those who ‘unfollow’ you”, which I would mostly agree with because YES It’s not personal! But, what about this fake follower issue? Should you “worry” about this if you are one of the 950 people who were fake followed in the 5 days monitored above? If you’re one of the smart 17 tweeple who returned the un-follow favor, I say no. The rest, I think you might just want to take a step back and think about this for a second.

Back in June, Twitter implemented a new set of “limits” to prevent users from taking advantage of the system and to thwart spammers. One of these limits is a “Maximum number of follow attempts in a day”. 

Follow limits are based on several things, one of which is our belief in a person’s good standing and intention. The behind-the-scenes portion of follow limiting varies by account, relationship, and changes over time.

What about an un-follow limit, Twitter? 

For those of you who landed on this post actually interested in building your following I will direct you to @guykawasaki’s very informative recent blog post: Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter.

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.

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

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:

First, that’s a great book title don’t you think!?: Social Media Reach and The Sphere of Influence

Recently I have been fascinated with Heavy Influencer activity in their Sphere of Influence and the ways which they’re leveraging social media reach for products and services. The reach is often times quite stunning, beyond just those using social media, engaging their audiences to build even stronger relationships. It all starts with just one Influencer and grows the region of reach around the Influencer by adding one additional reach node at a time.

To better illustrate this Social Media Reach lets take a look at recent examples of Reach With Intention efforts by two of my personal Twitter friends: Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) and Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee).

A few weeks ago Robert Scoble ran a promotion of sorts in which he gave away Seagate Hard drives (See: ‘Use Twitter or FriendFeed and win a new Seagate Drive‘). He announced this via Twitter and Friendfeed, and also posted the +140char details on his blog. The contest was pretty simple in that via social networking word of mouth anyone who physically showed up at the time/place would recieve the free drive.

On Tuesday at noon Eastern I’ll be standing by the Kodak sign in New York City’s Times Square (on side of Marriott Marquis hotel). I’ll have 20 drives. First 20 people to show me what Twitter or FriendFeed account they learned about the contest from will win a drive. So that’s one way you’ll win a drive, but that requires you to be in Times Square on Tuesday at noon. Not that easy for most of you.

But, not only will those 20 people win drives, but the 20 people who they learned about the contest from will also win a drive (we’ll send those to you).

All you need to do is Twitter or FriendFeed about the contest, tell your friends who’ll be in New York on Tuesday to come by and pick up a drive and you’ll win a drive too (these are cool drives, by the way, more about them on Tuesday).

Gary Vaynerchuk ran a similar giveaway last week in a live Ustream broadcast. Gary’s was a little different, focused just online, in that his goal was for a direct ripple effect via his followers/viewers social media channels. - Nothing new for anyone familiar with Gary’s Tactics.

For the Giveaway to even start viewers were instructed to use their social media reach to boost the Ustream videos online viewers to a level set by Gary. Once the viewer level had been reached Gary released the giveaway rules which again involved users social media reach.

Viewers were instructed to broadcast messages including all of Gary’s Twitter profiles, the first person to accomplish this task won a lovely iPod sound dock (I think that’s what it was).

Ive made an effort to avoid discussing the much debated PR/Marketing/Branding tactics in this post, as this is really more about pure Reach and how some are using their Sphere of Influence within social media. If you’re thinking about creating some ripples of your own make sure its a Reach With Intention:

Reach With Intention

1. Does it add value or enhance the experience of those we’re trying to reach. If so, how?
2. Will it engage your audience and help build stronger relationships?
3. Will your user(s) be able to spread your message independently?
4. What happens next? What’s plan B? (Especially important if you’re trying to do something viral — how do we nudge it if it stalls?)
5. How do I know understanding has been achieved (or if our message has been received)?
6. How do we measure our efforts?

For those still struggling with how to use Social Media to reach people who don’t use Social Media, check out ReadWriteWeb’s blog post on this very topic for Five Ways you can make this happen.

For more information on Influencer Marketing check out its Wiki page here

Some of you may already know Nullriver’s legacy in digital music, stemming from the debut of Winamp way back in 1997. As online streaming music became more popular they also launched SHOUTcast as a server to support creating or listening to Internet audio streams, and more!

The new app by Nullriver unleashes support for AAC, MP3, PLS, M3U on both the iPhone and iPod Touch, your music reach is now truly unlimited! Well, thats is as long as you’ve got a speedy connection! Tuner works on WiFi, 3G & EDGE. Just like I’m sure you’ve experienced with other apps like Pandora/Last.fm/Aol. Go WiFi and you will get perfect 128k+ bit rate streams. With a 3G connection, 96k & 128k bit rate streams sound amazing without any digital static. Yes, EDGE will restrict you to streaming lower bit rates and you will occasionally hear pops and dropouts.

Of course the app isnt free, at $5.99, but for all the music your little ear drums can handle its really a nominal fee.

The apps interface is really quite nice allowing you to find stations by searching Nullriver’s stream database by keyword, genre or a top 500 streams list. You can even enter a direct URL for streams not in their database, which is where I went to IMMEDIATELY! Any stream can also be bookmarked for later listening.

For those of you new to online streaming just shoot over to SHOUTCast.com and take a look at all the streams available! I think you’ll be blown away! - I’d also recommend hitting this up from your computer to allow for fast switching and perusing of the stations. Once you find a few you like, just enter these into your iPhone or iPod as bookmarks.

A free message from Apple and AT&T: An important software update for iPhone 3G has been available on iTunes since this past Monday. To get it, simply synch your iPhone 3G with iTunes and click the “Check For Update” button.

I found this kind of odd since I had already upgraded my iPhone on Tuesday, the day after the new version was released. My phone is currently running version 2.0.2 (5C1).

After receiving the text I ran a few google searches to see what the importance of this updates contents were, here is what I came up with:

• Bug fixes
• Improved communication with 3G networks
• Transition from music list to Coverflow has changed
• Tilt to left from landscape no longer switch to portrait when watching video, fixes 2.0 bug.

If anyone has anything more definitive on this, please post!

UPDATE: 8/27/2008

While not related to this ’security text message’ issue, WIRED posted the following security flaw: Massive iPhone Security Flaw Exposes Your Private Data

Acting on a tip from the Mac Rumors forums, Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz whipped up a video of the exploit in action, a ridiculously easy two-step process:

1. Tap emergency call.

2. Double tap the home button.

This drops you into the iPhones “favorites” section. From here you can make calls or send e-mail, and with a few steps you can browse to the Address Book and then on to Mail, Safari or the SMS application.


HOW TO FIX THE FLAW: Fortunately, Jesus gives us a workaround:

* Go to your iPhone’s Settings screen.
* Tap on General.
* Select the Home Button option.
* Set the home button’s double-tap action to something other than “Phone Favorites” — either “Home” or “iPod.”


Despite the easy fix, this is exactly the sort of thing Apple doesn’t want to happen. It hardly inspires credibility for the iPhone as a secure business device.

We expect it’ll be fixed in v2.1, or maybe Apple will roll out a 2.0.3 update to fix it. Until then, we can add it to the long list of Apple’s iPhone 3G embarrasments.

But it doesnt stop there, oh no sir! Toyota.me is one of the big ones you’ve likely heard about. It sold for $90,025. The whois record for Toyota.me now shows a Brazilian man Georg Kohler, who also snagged Porsche.me, as the owner - Go George!

Other big ticket .me domain sale names include:

• only.me $33,405
• aweso.me $24,189
• skoda.me $20,010
• brand.me $18,540
• lasvegas.me $15,105
• chatwith.me $15,035
• korea.me $15,015
• solve.me $13,116
• volu.me $10,605
• china.me $10,565
• picture.me $10,240
• recruit.me $10,155
• baidu.me $10,005
• onlinecasino.me $10,005
• tag.me $10,005 (I REALLY LIKE THIS ONE)
• secure.me $10,005
• dna.me $10,004

If you thought this was all over, think again! The .me auctions are actually still ongoing, checkout the Active Auctions - maybe you can still get’em while they’re hot.

The two ultimate goals for an mp3 junkie is sharing your music with others & portability. Simplify Media may just have cracked the code! The service reminds me of a personal shoutcast server, but with far less setup and technical know how to get the ball rolling. It integrates directly on your Mac or PC, sharable with friends, and even works on your iPhone or iPod! Seriously, Who could ask for more?

For iPhone users, there is a super simple process which really just involves your downloading the light weight client on your home computer. The App Store download guides you through the process with 5 simple screens:

Setting up the client on the PC was also painless, and as described as simple as creating an IM client. The application runs in the background, more lightweight than anything Ive seen in a long time, sharing your chosen mp3 directories.

I quickly tested this out on my 3G iPhone which worked without a hitch, just as expected. I also setup my wife to utilize my Simplified mp3 share on her non-3G iphone. The only flaw I found here was that I essentially had to use my “IM Credentials” on my wifes phone, without the ability to add another users credentials. But, what if this was a friend? You likely wouldnt want to give them your full username and password, right?

Taking this to the next step, I also sent the canned Simplified ‘invite’ email to a few friends. The canned invite to your stream is as follows:

I am using Simplify Media to give my friends and family access to my music library. Set up is fast, and the software is integrated with iTunes and Winamp.
To play my music, download Simplify Media for Mac, PC or Linux from:

http://www.simplifymedia.com/welcome.html

Once installed, click the ‘invite’ button and use my screen name: xxxxxx

It’s simple, safe and free.

After trying this out on my wife’s iPhone I find myself wondering how this is really ment to be shared. The Jury is still out on the full capabilities of the share features at this point.

I also need to perform some additional field testing, in the car via EDGE and 3G networks, but so far this seems super promising and I recommend the app!

To checkout the Simplify Media site directly, click here

Click for larger screenshot

WARNING: Clicking the ‘Rate Limiting’ Link on the Twitter API doc will lead to NSFW Porn images, and an endless loop of pop ups!! But, incase you want to see this for yourself:

Twitter.com directly links to the API docs from the following page: http://twitter.com/help/api
By clicking ‘The official Twitter API documentation’ on this page.

Every link on the API Google Groups doc page links to: http://handjob-sexackartsylvianelakehiawatha.googlegroups.com/…….

How has this NOT been spotted???? AND, corrected!

Im not sure how their Google Docs page would get hacked, or if their may be a security issue on Google’s end, but this certainly raises concern for the account used for the Twitter API documentation.