We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion. (For example, well-known artists, athletes, actors, public officials, and public agencies). We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.

We ran into a problem with an account purporting to be the office of the Dalai Lama [OHHDL] in 2008. The account looked like it might be real, but turned out to be someone impersonating the office. But it wasn’t exposed until more than 10,000 people had started following the Twitter account.

This move on Twitter’s part will be welcome.

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• Less Customization. Yea sure, you can add a few backgrounds and change a couple of fonts; but Twitters ability to customize is nothing compared to Myspace or even Facebook.

[Sky] This is totally on target. If you think back to your first encounter with MySpace (if you indeed had such an encounter) you remember the wild abandon with which people customized their MySpace pages. It was like the wall of your teenage bedroom. (I drew on my wall with magic marker – a desert scene with dunes and a camel caravan all around the room.) So, yes you can’t customize your Twitter page much at all (a single photo) and comeon (!), Twitter isn’t really a web experience – it’s about texting!

• Why Not Text. Pretty much, twitter is just another texting platform. You’re sending out mass texts to all your friends online. Thats cool, but why not just use your new Blackberry to do that

[Sky] Yes, totally! That is the point — Twitter is TXT. The real point of Twitter is that it is real-time. Facebook and MySpace, even though they have feeds, are not fundamentally real-time TXT platforms. Now, I will say that my buddies use Facebook all the time to post photos and share them, pretty much in real time, and I like Facebook much much much more because of this. But what the blogger missed is that plain TXT to your friends is not a group experience, while Twitter is a group TXTing experience! That’s the whole point. You and your followers are participating in a real-time group TXT experience.

• Applications. Facebook and Myspace are filled with all these cool applications teens love, as well as the ability to post countless videos, pictures, and other fun things.

[Sky] Can’t deny it. Facebook is a really rich environment within itself, while on the other hand Twitter is just TXT — except that this is changing daily as new sites are springing up that use the Twitter RSS feed and pull that information together in new ways. As a software architect, I would point out that this is simply a different architecture – the result can be similar.

• Social. In myspace and face book, teens join groups, whether its related to their school, a musical association, or other interest. Twitter doesn’t have that ability for social connections – on twitter, you simply follow or you don’t. Teens like the feeling of cliques and groups, and they like meeting new people without finding out everything they do.

[Sky] I don’t get it, sorry. You can set up your Twitter account so that people need you permission to follow you. If you do that, then you effectively have a group. So what’s the difference? (The difference is that you have to actually do it.)

• Time. Teens aren’t yet in need of a “professional” platform to display their thoughts. Teens are short in time, and the addition of a Twitter account just takes up more of their time. So rather than waste time, they’re content with texting, facebook, and myspace.

[Sky] This is BS. Twitter can be connected to Facebook so that you only have to post one place. It takes no more time to use Twitter than to use Facebook. But, this does point out that teens are as likely as anybody else to be resistant to new popular products — if they see Twitter as just another platform that wastes their time, then they won’t use it. I use Twitter a lot and actually much more than I use Facebook. It’s easy, streamlined, and single-purpose. Maybe I’m more open to innovation than teens are…?

The post Teens don’t use Twitter; so who does? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Last week I read somewhere (I know not where) about the potential for URL-shortening sites pointing you at sites containing malware. It’s pretty simple – imagine that someone posing as your friend twitters you and there’s one of these shortened URLs inside the message … but that this shortened URL points you at a site containing an embedded virus rather than at a site that you would want to actually visit. Your actual or supposed friend might not even know the site is poisoned. How can you protect yourself against this? Read this page at The Social Graph of Malware for more details. (I promise you there are no shortened URLs in the article.)

The post Can short URL sites and Twitter together be attack vectors? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

If I drop this message into my Tweetstream… “@quinnovator That was a great idea you had the other day!” …who sees it? Specifically, do all of my followers see it? This would be like sitting at a dinner party, wanting to ask a question of the person next to you, and shouting it out so everyone could hear it.

I was SO CERTAIN that all of my followers would see everything that I tweet, that I just didn’t believe it when Cathy Moore said (in this conversation on the Learnlets.com blog) “Yes, @ replies you use in the chat end up in your stream, but the only followers who see them are ones who also follow the person you replied to (unless they’ve changed their settings so they see everything you say to anyone). It’s a compromise rather than a perfect solution.”

Bolstering my opinion, Twitter Support even says “What is the difference between an @reply and a direct message? – – An @reply is a public message sent regardless of follow-ship that anyone can view.  A direct message can only be sent by someone you follow, and is a private message that only the author and recipient can view.” This made me believe that all my followers would receive my replies to @quinnovator because of the “regardless of follow-ship” phrase. (Although the word “view” could mean it can be viewed on the web but isn’t sent to your followers. A technicality, but perhaps that’s the key.)

Well, Cathy is right. Twitter claims that if a tweet starts with @username then it is sent to that person and those who follow that person. And it’s not sent to your followers, except for those who follow @username, and those who have specially asked to receive all replies sent by anyone/everyone they follow. They are parsing your tweet more carefully and now have two distinct ways of dealing with @username in a tweet  – replies and mentions. (This March 26, 2009, help page defines replies and mentions – and perhaps gives us a clue that this was implemented in March 2009.)

If you check your Twitter Settings (Settings/Notices) you’ll see this pop-up menu, which gives you a choice of seeing all @replies or limiting so you only see those to people you follow. This leads me to believe that if I follow @aaa and he tweets “@bbb hello.” then I will not see this message unless I also follow @bbb. I tested this with my friend @quinnovator, and it works as advertised.

I specifically want to see @reply messages because that’s one of the ways I find new and interesting people – referrals from my friends, let’s call it. Consequently I chose “all @ replies” in my settings.

Case closed.

Related to my earlier article about TweetChat as a Twitter-based mechanism for chats or meetings, here is more conversation on similar issues.

Ross Mayfield asked some questions and started a good discussion comparing Twitter, IM^[1] and forums. He started by asking these questions:

• How do you explain to new Twitter users how it is different from IM?
• How do you explain the difference between Twitter & Email to the email generation?
• How is Twitter different from a Forum?

[1] IM: Instant Messaging.

The post Twitter is like shouting at a dinner party appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Then I noticed the hashtag #lrnchat on the tweets and I investigated.
What was going on was that Marcia Connor (Twitter @marciamarcia), who is a learning maven and blogs for Fast Company, had arranged a “TweetChat” which is a Twitter-based discussion that is glued together by hashtags (#lrnchat in this case).  Clark Quinn obliged with the details in his blog. TweetChat.com lets you log in to Twitter (through TweetChat’s website) and then displays (in real time) every public tweet that contains the hashtag you specify. It basically stitches together a “conversation” from hashtagged tweets. In addition, if you write your messages using the TweetChat web site, the correct hashtag is automatically applied to each message, saving you some effort and probably a lot of frustration.

To the user of TweetChat, the exchange looks like a conversation among a bunch of people in a chatroom (some of whom you follow on Twitter and some of whom you don’t follow).

But, the problem is that all of your followers (and followers of others in the chat as well) get spammed with your out-of-context tweets that are intended for the group chat. And the non-TweetChat users only see your messages, not those of their non-friends participating in the chat. They see odd snippets from a conversation, not a coherent whole.

In my case, I knew several of the participants in the chat so I was seeing tweets from 3 or 4 out of the maybe dozen participants, and the chat was about something I know about, so it was reasonable for me to participate, but what about my followers?  What did they think?  They have different interests, and most of them would/were be uninterested in this particular chat.

Well it turned out to be entirely an interesting experience – not just the content of the chat but the way it all worked out over time. I moderated my participation a bit, and tried to always add messages that would make sense out of context, so my followers could benefit even if they weren’t getting all of the participants’ messages. And also, at least one of my followers was interested, figured out what was going on, and joined the chat late in its two-hour run. (Yuck, the word “follower” does sound kind of odd in this context, doesn’t it? – are these my disciples? Not.) I think this tool has a long way to go, and a connection on Skype or any other IM-chat tool would have been much easier and less annoying to those who follow us on Twitter, but overall it turned out to be not only an interesting two-hour experience for me, but beneficial for one of my friends as well.

View the TweetChat in its entirety.

Search Twitter for the #lrnchat hashtag (a different way of finding the same thread of messages).

Near the end of the chat (after about 700 messages were exchanged), we were noticed and picked up as a trend by WTHashtag.com. This was fun because at this point a couple of strangers joined the chat – at least they looked like strangers to me – seemed that they wanted to be noticed, so they joined the conversation and added additional hashtags in their tweets so they could benefit from spinoff traffic from our chat. (Reminds me of the early comment spam in blogs, where people would post a comment on your blog post just to pick up traffic for their own site…Viagra and medications cheap from Canada, etc.)

Here’s Marcia’s description of how she got enmeshed in Twitter and some of her observations on how Twitter can change the type of interactions people have with each other.

The post TweetChat: Twitter for meetings – but it’s a tossed salad appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

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