Backing Up Your Social Media

Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do.

As an individual you might not care too much if one of the niche services fails. As a business who relies on social media, however, you should care.

Every post to Twitter or Facebook or Blogger or (insert whatever services you use here) represents effort spent to promote your brand. That effort is probably from paid staff (because nobody lets interns have the keys to their global brand, right?) and represents some cost as a result. Cultivated Facebook campaigns, Twitter conversations, Pinterest boards, all represent a combination of your effort and community participation.

When a service goes away, so does the money and effort you spent to cultivate it. So does the community feedback that demonstrates to others that yours is a good brand. So does any SEO benefit it may be giving you. So does the content you created.

I regularly ask social media practitioners how they back up all the data they post to these services and it almost always results in blank stares.

Most organizations make some effort to back up their marketing or sales materials, in addition to their intellectual property, but for some reason social media is left out in the cold.

I'll cover some examples of what I have done and do, along with some tips on how you can plan for your own back-up.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to produce an archive of all your tweets whenever you request it. What you will get is a link to download a ZIP archive which contains a completely stand-alone web site that allows you to see all your tweets. You can use this site right from your computer with no internet connection.

I suggest taking it one step further and creating a folder on your public web site so you and all your team (and even the general public if you want to share the address) can access all of your tweets at any time from any where. This method will also allow you to search all your tweets instead of being limited by Twitter's own date restrictions on searches. For example, I have my Twitter archive at AdrianRoselli.com/Tweets.

Tweets in the archive contain the full content of the original tweet, but do not contain any of the replies to, favorites of, or re-tweets of your tweets. They do, however, link you directly to the tweet at Twitter.com so you can get all that information.

As part of your job as a social media manager I recommend you set up a calendar reminder for the first of each month (or whenever works for you) to download and store your Twitter archive.

Facebook

Facebook also allows you to create an archive of everything you have posted, including photos, videos, wall posts, messages and chat conversations along with the names of your Facebook friends. It does not include comments you've left on the posts of others. An expanded archive option also provides historic information such as your IP addresses for when you have logged into Facebook.

As such, I recommend against posting your entire Facebook archive to your web site as it will probably contain information that you have opted to not share with the general public (especially since it can also contain other people's private information).

I should note that I am talking about a personal profile here, not a business profile. So far I have been unable to find information on how to archive a business/organization profile. Suggestions are welcome.

[Your Blog Here]

Quite a lot of social media involves maintaining a blog. This blog may exist on any one of many platforms, including one you've built yourself. For this example, I am talking about a blog that you host elsewhere, probably for free, such as an option from Wordpress or Blogger, among others.

In an ideal scenario you will have secured a blog sub-domain, such as blog.adrianroselli.com. This is the first step to having some portability and control should your blogging platform go away. It won't be so easy to get adrianroselli.blogger.com if Blogger goes away, mostly because I don't own (and likely would be unable to purchase) the domain blogger.com.

If your blog platform does go away and you have some advance notice, you have some options to get your content before it is lost. Some platforms will offer you a way to get all your content out and other platforms may offer you a way to import that content. If your failing platform doesn't offer an archive, you can always spider the content using a tool like HTTrack.

Ideally you'll want to recreate your content on your new blogging platform, so make sure you also recreate the same page addresses (most of the blogging tools allow you to create a custom page address, though it will be a manual process). In this scenario, any inbound links won't be broken. For those cases where you cannot replicate the page addresses, explore options to create custom redirections with your new blog provider or, if it's on your own server, through server-level mappings.

Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and Other Services

I have used many services over the years, in particular services targeted at image sharing. I have used Brightkite, Plyce, Picplz, Posterous and am now on to Tumblr. With the exception of Tumblr (so far), they have all gone away. I haven't lost my images, however. In the case of Brightkite they made everything available for download for quite some time and in a structured format. Picplz offered the same, but not until many users raised a stink and followed its founder to his next gig to push their point. Posterous made its site available as a static HTML archive.

Had these sites not made the content available, however, I still had a plan to get everything out. I simply spidered my profile page for each site using a tool (HTTrack again) that converts it all to static HTML. In short, I captured every page and every image to a format that I could simply post on my own site or view on my local computer (as I did with Picplz and Posterous). While I cannot replicate the old addresses (similar to the case with a blog domain), I can at least make my content available should I want to reference it again.

When Pinterest or Instagram or Tumblr or insert-service-here announces it is going away, I will simply fire up the same tool and begin my archive process. Each service may very well offer a tool to do this, but I'd rather make sure I have it just in case they don't. In addition, sometimes it's more work to process a stack of JSON files than it is to simply spider the site and post it somewhere on your own site.

Related Bits

• Startups should bend over backwards to let users take their data after they shut down [Updated], June 3, 2012 at The Next Web.


• Proposed Standards for the Care and Feeding of User Generated Content, June 25, 2012 at Zeldman.com


• You Get What You Pay For, December 17, 2010 by me.

Too lazy to read Terms of Service. Just going to upload videos to Vine & Instagram at the same time and let them fight about who owns them.

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) June 20, 2013

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Social Media Goals for the New Year

Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it's really not much different from what we've done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong.

Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a New Year Resolution for it to take effect. So here's my attempt at guidance.

Background

When I got to college, few people had heard of email and even fewer used it. Usenet was a foreign concept to nearly everyone I knew in meat-space, but with so much traffic I knew it wasn't hurting for users. Before there was a web, I understood the notion of choosing my words carefully. Archives of all my posts would surely stick around for many years, I thought, and so they have. I can still find stuff I posted back in 1992.

As the web happened and it became easier for anyone to share anything, and as email flourished (back when we had time to read it instead of filtering it), I adopted a variation on an old idea of how to behave in email — never write something in an email you wouldn't want to be posted on the front page of The New York Times. Nowadays maybe it's a tweet on the front page of the Fail Blog.

I think we should all accept that with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, let alone all the surveillance cameras, web cams, and soon airborne drones made by 12-year-olds, everything you do runs the risk of being scrutinized and posted online for the world to judge. By posting your own contributions to social media sites, you (and I) continue to drive it.

When Facebook's co-founder's sister (who is also Facebook's former marketing director) posted a photo to Facebook and was surprised to see it tweeted by someone she didn't know, claiming it as an invasion of privacy, the collective web laughed at her. She became the holiday poster child for how confusing Facebook's privacy settings are to understand and implement — and she's the sister of the face of the company.

It also makes her follow-up tweet all the more laughable, partly because I doubt she asked the permission of her family members before posting their photos online:

Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 26, 2012

What You Can Do as a Social Media User

Most importantly, don't think that just because you have locked down your social media accounts, no one that you haven't authorized can see it. An errant retweet or a misunderstood setting are all it takes to make that notion come crashing down. Just look at Zuckerberg's sister — she clearly doesn't understand either of the platforms she uses despite what she thinks.

I have my own set of rules I follow and I try to lead by example. That doesn't mean all mine are right, but I had to start somewhere.

• For the most part, I do not post photos of people without their permission. Exceptions include crowd shots.


• I don't post photos of children, though when there are exceptions I do not post names with the photos.


• When I do take general place or crowd photos, I avoid posting ones with the faces of children visible.


• I avoid posting photos with faces visible when I am making fun of a particular fashion choice.


• I don't create venues for homes.


• I don't post photos with street addresses visible.


• I don't embed GPS information when tweeting from someone's home.


• I don't retweet tweets from a protected account (unless I have permission or it's a particularly good insult to me).


• I don't tag people in photos without permission or prior experience that it will be fine.


• I don't tag friends in places when I am out, which is also why I don't auto-tweet my Foursquare check-ins (on top of the fact that it's annoying).


• I don't include information about friend or family schedules in posts, especially when they are travelling.


• I do not sync my phone with any cloud service or allow any auto-posting. I'd rather pick and choose than run the risk of the wrong image making it to the wrong place.

It's worth noting that I have violated all of these at least once, sometimes by accident and sometimes by stupidity. In a handful of cases I have been rightly chastised.

When it comes to kids (anyone's kids), I work to make sure I don't put enough information out there that a motivated offender couldn't just drive up to a kid on the street and spout enough information to make the kid think it's safe to get into his car. I wish more parents on Facebook made that effort.

What You Should Do as a Person in the World

Accept that everyone has a camera and can post photos and videos of you at any time. Accept that you may appear unintentionally in crowd photos that appear on everything from locked-down Facebook pages to the local news to band fliers and so on.

When you have a friend who keeps posting photos of you that you don't want posted, you should confront him or her. At some point you'll have to decide between how cautious or uptight you want to be versus how much that friendship means to you.

If you are a Facebook user, you can control whether or not you get tagged in photos (as a link to your Facebook page only) and you can even un-tag yourself.

Either behave or own your pile of crazy.

Related

• Facebook security hole allows anyone to view private New Year's Midnight Delivery messages and photos, December 30, 2012.


• How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages of data in 57 categories, December 28, 2012


• Zuckerberg's Etiquette Sham, December 28, 2012.


• Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Complains Of Facebook Privacy Breach, December 26, 2012.


• Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency', December 26, 2012

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Social Media Profile versus a Web Site

This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page.

Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author's "infographic" that suggests users find Facebook more useful than a brand's site). I have been down this road more than once, but I thought I would follow the link and see what those six well-thought, sound business reasons must be.

1. Websites Require Constant Maintenance

Given the immediate nature of social media, a traditional marketing web site needs far less maintenance than trying to engage followers. I argue that many users expect content on a web site to be relatively constant, updated as appropriate and, in the case of some web applications, automated to a degree.

A Twitter account that pushes out content every few days, however, might be considered slow. One that pushes content every few minutes can be an assault to a follower's timeline. One that doesn't respond to tweets from users might be considered disrespectful.

Contrast this with a Facebook page that has some traction and has many fans. When those fans post to the brand's wall or comment on posts from the brand, there is an expectation of a quick response from users, which requires constant vigilance to keep users from feeling like they are being ignored.

The author also claims web sites can cost between $50 and $5,000 dollars to build, but makes no effort to identify how much a social media resource costs to maintain profiles and fresh content across multiple social media outlets. This assumes a business isn't so clueless that interns are considered good resources for representing the entire brand on social media.

Sticking with the cost argument, I think the author hasn't been paying attention to recent Facebook changes in the form of promoted content.

2. Social Media Is Scalable

The author seemingly assumes most web sites are hosted on servers under desks. Granted, the real point is that a web site may not be able to handle traffic from a random viral traffic spike.

This may very well be true for some sites, but given how many sites are hosted on, and get resources from, content delivery networks and national hosts, the need to scale can often be handled with a phone call to a hosting provider to kick the site into the next hosting bracket. One cannot call Twitter or Facebook when it has been overloaded and demand it scales up for your traffic.

Interestingly, pages on my own site have suffered far more downtime as a result of embedded content from Twitter and Facebook. When they suffer the inevitable and random "fail whale," their poorly-written scripts can take down my entire page. At least when social media platforms are on the fritz, I can still direct users to the rest of my web site for information.

3. Websites Require Specialized Knowledge

I am actually a little sad this point isn't true. With the preponderance of WYSIWYG editors, export-to-web features, free platforms like Blogger or Wordpress with pre-built themes, it's far too easy for someone without specialized knowledge to get his or her message out there. And this is a good thing.

The author does make a point that to have a truly unique site with modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS will require someone with skill to do it for you. Oddly, the alternative he proposes is to use exactly the same Facebook or Twitter layout as everyone else. And I can personally guarantee it won't be built to modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS.

To be fair to social media, almost no web site claiming to be built to modern standards actually is either.

4. Your Customers Are Already on Social Media

Really? He knows that? He has run a series of surveys, done market analysis, engaged my users directly and determined they are on social media? And he found more than 15% of US adult web users are on Twitter?

For my target audience, he is right. Although that's by accident. I can also rattle off plenty of businesses (including my own clients) who don't know that for sure, haven't done the research, aren't in a position to, and can even guess that it's still not true.

The assumption in the article is that users are already inundated with web addresses. He argues that somehow a link to a Facebook page can percolate above all that, that even a Twitter hashtag will make sense to more users. The logic is that users are already on social media, so they'll just go right to your message.

Nevermind that your target users may be in a demographic that doesn't use social media. Or your business may not be a fit for social media. Or that there are still more web users than Facebook users (even if you include the thousands and thousands of fake accounts). Or that there is already enough noise in my Twitter and Facebook feed I don't see stuff from my real-life friends.

5. You’ll Be Easier to Find

Using SEO as a dirty word (well, it is), the author suggests that it's hard to find things on the web. He says social media platforms have their own search already, so if you just focus there you will be found much more readily.

To make an anecdotal argument here, which is abnormal for me but curiously appropriate in this case, I can tell you that if I want to find a brand or person on Twitter or Facebook, I go to Google first. Google provides a far better search for me than I can get in Facebook's or Twitter's results, partly because both Twitter and Facebook are too busy trying to pitch me or assume I know their lingo. If I'm not logged into either one, it's an overall useless experiment. If I am trying to research a product or service, then Facebook and Twitter are the last places I'll go.

Given how readily Twitter suggests people or brands I should follow that are either promoted, of no interest, or that I have already unfollowed, I would not rely on the discovery method of gaining new followers. Given how Facebook has changed its model to require you to pay to get your message in front of fans and their friends (promoted posts), I wouldn't rely on discovery there, either.

If you dismiss the value of a search engine to help users find you and rely solely on the search and discovery features of social media, then you are painting yourself into a corner. Twitter use won't generate enough content over time for all your targeted phrases (unless you constantly assault followers) and neither will Facebook, because they both push older content down, out of the view of search engines.

6. Facebook and Twitter Facilitate Content Creation

Yes, they do.

When I am particularly angry at a brand, I go right to their Facebook wall and post my issue. I also approach them on Twitter. In some cases, I hijack their hashtags. I create all sorts of content about how much that brand has disappointed me. The brand may respond and make it right, but my words are out there, getting indexed by Google, being associated with the brand.

But that's not what the author means, he means (his words) content can often be generated through the simple click of an upload button. Regardless of the fact that you need someone to take that photo, craft that caption, be available to respond if people engage with it, and even hope that anyone cares, he's telling us that content is free and writes itself.

Which it doesn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have had such a good turnout (and feedback) at my content strategy session at the local WordCamp.

Wrap-up

Only in the closing paragraph does the author suggest that maybe you might still need a web site and maybe you might benefit from Twitter and Facebook. So I have to ask myself, why didn't he lead with this? Why are the hollow arguments told strictly from the perspective of spending you effort on Facebook and Twitter to the detriment of your site? Because he's a social media services peddler.

If the author truly believed that Twitter and Facebook are more important to have than a web site, then I look forward to when he demonstrates that belief by shutting down his site and moving it all to Facebook and Twitter. Until then, it's a poorly-argued sales pitch.

Related

These are posts I've written that go into more detail on some of the points I raise above. Traditional web sites easily have as many issues and more, but that's not what this discussion is about.

• You Get What You Pay For


• Picplz Shutting Down, as Free Services Often Do


• Use Twitter's New Embedded Timeline without Slowing Your Page


• Reviewing Twitter's New Profile Header


• Facebook, HTML5, and Mis-Reporting


• Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits


• Facebook Likes…Your Data


• Twitter As Passive-Aggressive Enabler


• Twitter's t.co Continues UX Failure of Link Shorteners


• Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing

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Reviewing Twitter's New Profile Header

Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature:

Starting today you can make your presence on Twitter more meaningful with new Twitter profiles. […] You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere.

By adding a header image, I am both making Twitter more meaningful and expressing myself. Even though I have used Twitter for 15,000+ of my own tweets so far to express myself, and follow a group of folks that bring meaning to my Twitter stream. In case it's not obvious, I am suspect of the reasoning. It feels to me more like Twitter trying to make itself more like Facebook (and Google+ and App.net), especially with the promotion of any photos from my timeline into their own prominent photo bar on mobile displays.

Twitter offers only two parameters for providing the header image — it should not be over 5MB and it should be 1,252 × 626 pixels. I can only assume this over-sized behemoth is Twitter's way of accounting for high resolution displays. And so I dutifully made and uploaded my header image.

Desktop Browser

Screen capture of new Twitter header on desktop browser.

I am wholly unimpressed with the desktop browser experience. Not only has the image been scaled down (which I expected), it was scaled down to 542 pixels in width, or by a factor of 2.31. That's not a nice even number and it relies on browser image scaling (which isn't even bicubic in older browsers) to present the image.

In addition, my name and description are lost in the image, which means I'd have to build a space into my file just to account for the text. On top of all this, the link to my web site doesn't stand out in any way as a hyperlink. It is not obvious that it is clickable, and that's ultimately the thing I want people to click if they visit my profile page.

Forgetting how the image disrupts copy laid on top of it, the size of the image header leaves (at the window size I was using) only 3 tweets visible in my timeline. While at this same window size I only had 5 tweets visible with the old header, I'd rather have those two tweets back given the issues I have with the new header.

Compare this with my profile page before the header:

Screen capture of old Twitter header on desktop browser.

Mobile Browser

Screen capture of new Twitter header on mobile browser (Chrome on Nexus 7).

The mobile browser experience isn't much better. The text is nearly illegible, but at least the hyperlink to my site appears to be bold, if smaller. Only three tweets are visible and then there is a bar with images I have posted. The worst part is that only one of those is mine (the other five are retweets), they are from July, and the thumbnail, when tapped, loads the wrong image. I don't like my tweets being truncated for this low-value content.

Without the header image, however, the experience is almost no better. I still lose the same amount of space to a header image I have not defined. The only plus is that the text is now legible. See the before photo:

Screen capture of old Twitter header on mobile browser (Chrome on Nexus 7).

Mobile App

Screen capture of updated Twitter app with new header (Nexus 7).

Everything I said about the mobile browser experience with and without the new Twitter header applies.

Except this is even worse.

You can't see my description, location or web site address in my profile without swiping to a second panel. Perhaps in some misguided attempt to make the text more legible by laying down a black overlay on the background header image, Twitter has now made my biographical information and link to my site totally invisible without some user interaction.

Not providing a header image does not save me from this mistake. As you can see below, custom image or not, my information is still a screen away.

Screen capture of updated Twitter app without new header (Nexus 7).

Conclusion

I removed the header image. I see no reason to push all those kilobytes to users to lessen their experience should they stumble across my profile page. On top of that, I don't want to hide any more tweets than necessary nor obfuscate the link to my site (though I have no control over that in the mobile app). Perhaps in the future I'll take time to craft an image to better fit the layout, but I have more important things to do than try to shoehorn something into Twitter's mistake. Not to mention they can just change the rules again at any time.

Frankly, I'd rather Twitter enable Twitter cards for all sites. There is far more value to me as a content creator and as a user in that feature. And that feature leans on the existing Twitter experience, not some vapid attempt to copy other social media platforms.

Update: 2:19PM

I just discovered .net Magazine did a brief piece on the Twitter header image this morning, and the sources they cite say pretty much the same thing as I do.

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Use Twitter's New Embedded Timeline without Slowing Your Page

Update: September 7, 2012

I misunderstood how browser load external JavaScript files when that load itself comes from embedded script. Ben Ward explained it to me and referenced this handy article, Thinking Async.

The gist of the article is that using JavaScript to write in a call to a JavaScript file causes the browser to load the external script asynchronously.

While it may be like wearing suspenders with a belt, I'm still going to leave my async edits in my Twitter embedded timeline calls.

Original Entry

Yesterday Twitter announced its new embedded timeline feature for web sites. The gist is that you drop a block of code on your site and users will see the timeline for the selected account as if they were viewing it on Twitter.com — embedded media, expanded links, etc.

This is a new feature and is likely to change, even if the how-to Twitter post isn't too clear on that. I say that it will change because of language in the developer documentation like No other customization options are available at this time, as well as the slew of requests for more type styling options (among other customization requests) on the Twitter Embedded Timelines Questions page(s).

There are also known bugs. If your domain has a hyphen in it, then this won't work. If you are using Opera Mobile, Android 2 or 3 default browser, or an iPad, then the swipe-to-scroll gesture doesn't work (I already reported that one).

Another issue that Twitter may not consider a bug is how the script to embed the timeline is loaded. Currently if you have an embedded tweet or the old embedded timeline on your page and Twitter is down (fail-whale down), then your web page will take quite a while to render. This is a function of how browsers load JavaScript. The browser won't finish rendering the page until it has loaded all the JavaScript or given up (a timeout, which can take minutes).

While there are JavaScript functions that can mitigate this, those don't come into play until the script has downloaded. Instead, HTML5 has a couple attributes for the script element that apply here — async and defer. Essentially these tell the browser it can render the page before the script is downloaded. Since Twitter content is often just add-on content for your existing page, this is the right approach.

Instead of spending a thousand words explaining how this attribute works, I refer you to the WHATWG specification using an embedded tweet where I manually insert the async attribute:

If you use JavaScript and don't know about async/defer HTML5 attributes, you should read up and use: whatwg.org/specs/web-apps…

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) September 6, 2012

The new embedded timeline feature doesn't make it quite that easy. Twitter gives you code to drop on your page that has no script element into which you can casually paste async. The script element is generated by JavaScript, which looks like this:

<a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/aardrian" data-widget-id="243755160277487616">Tweets by @aardrian</a>

<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>


Many of the people who may drop Twitter timelines into their web site are not JavaScript coders. So I whipped up a quick modification you can make to that pre-generated script that will drop the async attribute where it needs to go:

<a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/aardrian" data-widget-id="243755160277487616">Tweets by @aardrian</a>

<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.async=true;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>


The js.async=true; tells the Twitter function to drop an async into its script reference when it gets created. The generated chunk of code will look like this:


<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" async="" id="twitter-wjs">


Now if Twitter goes down again (which it will) your page won't hang as a result.
I have also asked Twitter to consider including async in its standard copy-and-paste code.

I have eight (8!) examples of this in play on my Buffalo food truck page, where I have embedded the timelines of the current crop of food trucks in the area so I can check them all at once while aimlessly wandering the streets in a hunger stupor.

If you have a better solution, I am all ears. Please drop it in the comments with any other feedback.

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Twitter Cards Are Now Valid HTML

If you've used the Twitter web interface much you might have noticed that sometimes a tweet that links to a popular site includes previews of the pictures, or perhaps video, or even maps.

For example, when I check into a venue on Foursquare and allow that to be auto-tweeted, the web version of my tweet includes venue details including a map, address, number of check-ins and (if I posted a photo) a cropped picture.

This sample image shows how that appears (albeit scaled down to fit on this page since it's so darn tall), but sadly (or goodly, depending on your objective and grammar) the embedded tweet feature doesn't contain all that detail when drawn:

Some of the smaller kids at Buffalo Soccer Club working on their moves. (@ JFK Recreation Center) [pic]: 4sq.com/Mb0qMT

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) June 21, 2012

If you go directly to the Foursquare page for that check-in and look at the source code you will find these two meta tags (among many others):


<meta value="@foursquare" name="twitter:site" />

<meta value="photo" name="twitter:card" />


In fact, if you look for other sites whose Twitter references tend to include images, videos, and so on, then you may find these meta tags rolling around in the page header. Here is a sample block from a YouTube video:


<meta name="twitter:card" value="player">

<meta name="twitter:site" value="@youtube">

<meta name="twitter:player" value="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ">

<meta property="twitter:player:width" content="640">

<meta property="twitter:player:height" content="480">


This feature is called a Twitter Card, and Twitter has a detailed tutorial of how to enable Twitter Cards for your site at its developer site. If the code looks a bit familiar, it's based on Facebook's OpenGraph, which also stuffs content into meta tags for the use of Facebook embeds.

Not all sites that use Twitter cards will be automatically supported — at least not yet. Twitter is trying this out on some clearly major sites (Foursquare and YouTube are examples) and for anyone else to get their site content embedded into tweets like this they must apply to participate.

Unfortunately, you first have to implement Twitter cards on your site. Only once you have implemented them can you apply to participate, and even then there is no guarantee you'll be included. From Twitter's sign-up page:

As we roll out this new feature to users and publishers, we are looking for sites with great content and those that drive active discussion and activity on Twitter. Unfortunately we will not be able to respond to or approve all requests.

Even more unfortunately, the documentation Twitter provided (as of Friday morning) required you to use meta tags that would not validate. In both HTML4 and HTML5, a meta tag with a name attribute must have a corresponding content attribute, not a value attribute (or, more accurately, there is no content attribute).

A developer filed a bug report noting that the Twitter card code as presented on Twitter's site does not validate. Though Twitter did not respond to this bug report, on Friday afternoon Twitter updated its sample to make the code valid HTML — though nowhere in its document does Twitter notify readers what was updated or that the unnamed change made the code valid.

For those of us who implemented the Twitter Card on our sites in anticipation of wider roll-out of this feature, we are now faced with going through our code to update it at additional expense. Sadly, since this is relatively new and unannounced, there is no way to notify developers that the code has changed.

Twitter will now also be forced to support both variants, since it's clear Foursquare, YouTube, and probably everyone else who has this code in place has not changed it since Friday and may not change it for some time to come. In the end, if web developers just copy content from other sites as a base, they could end up propagating this bad markup.

Having already set up pages on our not-for-profit Buffalo Soccer Club site to use Twitter Cards on Friday morning (which Twitter does not honor yet), I now have to go back through and change them to use the new and valid meta. On the bright side, if you use a content management system that allows you to put custom meta tags on your pages, then you may not need to spend any money to get a developer to implement this feature (hint about our CMS, QuantumCMS).

The bright spot to this story is that Twitter made the change and the code will validate. Those of us trying to be early adopters should be more than happy to make the change.

Interesting aside — I actually wrote this up on Friday when the Twitter code was still broken, but when I went back to review/edit this post on Friday I saw Twitter had updated its code. I hate wasting a blog post, so you have now read my re-write.

Update: March 26, 2013

A List Apart has a new story today outlining not just Twitter cards, but also the the Open Graph meta data that pre-dates Twitter cards: “Like”-able Content: Spread Your Message with Third-Party Metadata

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Twitter Improves Site Speed by Dumping Hash-Bangs

Back in September 2010 Twitter changed how its site renders by pushing much of the processing to the web browser using JavaScript and hash-bang (#!) URLs. Today Twitter has announced it is essentially dumping that approach:

To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we've been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server. This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers.

Surprising no one that I am the kind of guy who would say this: I told you so, Twitter.

The rest of the Twitter post explains why #! URLs are not the best solution for rendering content quickly and consistently. Sadly, not every type of Twitter page will see this update as I noted last week:

In early 2011 I wrote about #! in URLs as bad (rosel.li/020911). @Twitter has almost got it—#! removed from tweet URLs *only* so far.

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) May 23, 2012

Congratulations to Twitter for making parts of its site five times faster than its broken implementation.

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Why All the Food Photos? (at evolt.org)

How can you not share something so tasty?

The Internet has a thing for cats. There's really no denying it, at least when taken in the whole of the internet.

Social media, on the other hand, seems to have a thing for food. While social media is just one aspect of the Internet, we can take comfort that social media's penchant for food is not about cat food or edible cats. It is hard to deny, however, that social media, with its friendliness to instant image uploads, constant quick commentary, and location-based tendency, is dominated by food.

Read the full article at evolt.org

I wrote an article for evolt.org yesterday that goes into a little detail on why people do this, along with some of my reasons. Go read the full article, including some of my own food photos, at evolt.org. If you are like me and post photos of your meals, snacks, or other random food bits, feel free to leave some comments here or there with your own reasons. I suspect some of the reasons I listed will look familiar to you.

Judge by how many of the Social Media Club chapter events center around food.

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Twitter's t.co Continues UX Failure of Link Shorteners

It's been a few weeks since Twitter moved to its own link shortening service for tweets. Originally the shortener only kicked in for tweets over 18 characters, but Twitter recently moved to have it affect all URLs in tweets. Twitter's argument was that this allows Twitter to reduce the number of spam and phishing URLs embedded in tweets. In Twitter's own words (from the t.co site):

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets.

Twitter's Reasons for the t.co Shortener

Twitter's explanation sounds reasonable but doesn't bear itself our now that I've had some time to try it out. Let me explore...

As Protection from Spam/Phishing

I still get the same number of spammers on Twitter, I did not expect a link shortener to change that. Those spammers also use link shorteners, so whether or not the t.co service came into play it wouldn't matter much — the link is still obfuscated. If the t.co service was doing its job, however, then those tweets would be caught or flagged. Even if it wasn't a pro-active service (because we know people can change the destination of a link shortened by many services, rendering it malicious from an initial innocuous configuration), I would expect it to do its job when I follow a link. It doesn't. Just this morning I received a spam tweet, and for the scope of this post opted to click the link. The t.co address showed up in browser, it spent time processing, and then sent me to the phishing site. Twitter's first claim is false.

A couple weeks ago I followed a tweeted link from a local business that fed through the t.co service. The t.co service told me that the link was to a spam or malware site. It was not. The link was to an online petition for a local issue. While I was motivated to just grab the original link from the tweet, there's no way to tell how may others may have had the same experience and were unable to weigh in on the petition. The risk here is that the t.co can also produce false positives, damaging anyone's reliance on Twitter as a link dissemination tool.

As Value for the Developer Ecosystem

Let's be clear here — as a user I don't care how much easier it is for developers. I don't let my web team just throw a bunch of fields on a web form without regard to the end user, no matter how much more quickly they can do it. But Twitter has a model that is less about the end user and more about driving organizations to rely on Twitter through its API and reporting features. The t.co shortener provides a boon to Twitter because it makes it easier for web masters to see how much traffic came to their site from a Twitter-shortened link.

Sometimes that t.co link isn't from Twitter (it's been shared elsewhere such as a blog, through originally from a tweet). Sometimes the same web page address has more than one t.co address. Sometimes that t.co link is to a bit.ly (or other shortener) link, which are often created for use on Twitter anyway.

As a Quality Signal for Relevant or Interesting Tweets

Given that I have no confidence in Twitter's ability to filter malware, spam and phishing sites, I certainly cannot believe that quality is an appropriate word. Just seeing the t.co address in a tweet doesn't tell me that it is relevant or interesting. Twitter may decide a link or tweet is relevant or interesting simply by measuring how many clicks it gets. In the absence of a clear explanation, those two metrics are also suspect.

Other Factors

Twitter Clients

I use TweetDeck on my computers and Seesmic on my phone. I have used Hootsuite and sometimes I use Twitterfall for a Twitter wall at events. They all display the t.co address instead of the full address underneath. These apps don't update at the same pace as the Twitter web site and not all users will allow frequent updates (whether by corporate IT policies or lack of interest) to their Twitter clients for when they do support expanding the t.co addresses.

This means I regularly see a t.co address. This wouldn't be an issue except I rely on the URL to know what will happen when I click a link: youtu.be means my Twitter client will play a YouTube video, twitpic.com means my client will show a picture, and so on. That link scent is now gone and I click fewer links as an end user because I don't know what I will get.

Twitter-Provided Tweet Streams

I use the Twitter-provided JavaScript code to embed a Twitter feed on my personal site. This does not expand the t.co URLs to show the full address. I push the Twitter-provided RSS feed of my tweets to my blog. This does not expand the t.co URLs to show the full address. Tweets pushed to Facebook or other services come with the t.co, again hiding the full address and link scent.

Extra Bandwidth Burden

At peak times I have found a link that goes through t.co takes longer to redirect me to my destination address. Often that destination address is being hit by only a few users, maybe a few thousand. The destination site can typically handle the traffic. The t.co service is taking the brunt of all the traffic from all the users on Twitter. This increases the bandwidth used across the web (and on my phone) and results in a longer click-to-destination time.

Copy/Paste Hassle

This may sound like a minor issue, but I regularly copy an entire tweet or just the URL from a tweet, often wanting to share via email, in my blog, or elsewhere. When I do that I typically get the t.co link, and I think it's obvious by now that I do not want that. If this affects me, then others who may do the same but not know how to tease the expanded URL out of a tweet could end up pushing traffic to my site from a blog that reports itself as a t.co referrer. In my reporting I will now be unable to distinguish traffic from a link and from a source that I may want to otherwise engage.

Blocking

I have read from a few sources that t.co is blocked in China. Given Twitter's prominence in recent events such as the Arab Spring, London riots, and now even Occupy Wall Street, creating a single point of failure with t.co means not only are the links blocked, but the expanded link may be blocked easily by any organization or government that wants to quell activity on Twitter.

My Former Reliance

I use a photo sharing service that pushes a link to the photo to Twitter. I used to take the RSS feed, along with the geolocation of the tweets, and pull the URL from the photo service to quickly hack up into a path to the thumbnail. I would then embed this modified RSS feed into a Google Map to show my activities and travels — most recently for a trip to Italy.

Because I was not using the Twitter API I could not be considered a developer, so I don't fall into Twitter's stated support for developers. As such, when the RSS feed from Twitter converted the URL from my photo sharing service my maps didn't display images and my followers stopped clicking links to my photos.

I also regularly craft URLs in tweets to remove the query string nonsense and unnecessary "www" prefixes (among other bits). I also regularly craft a tweet with the intent to make the URL visible to the end user because the address often feeds into my point or joke, Instead I find I exclude the "http://" from the address to get my point across, but it also means the link is not clickable for many users depending on their Twitter client.

A common annoyance is that Twitter now encodes URLs that are already far shorter than the Twitter-encoded t.co address. My own tweets have seen URLs double in character count after Twitter applies its link shortener.

Why Did Twitter Do This?

Three key reasons that I can contrive:

1. Twitter owes much of its success to developers building apps and integrating it into other services. Shortening URLs reduces the efforts an end user has to make in a third-party tool to stay under the 140 character limit.


2. Twitter's importance as a driver of web site traffic is reinforced when webmasters see the t.co links in their logs.


3. All the t.co links track information, which puts Twitter in a position to monetize the data it captures from each shortening and each click.

For all the reasons I state above, Twitter isn't really helping the end user (either content consumer or non-developer). Twitter's goals here are more for its own gains. In the end, since it's a free service they have the right to do that. I would certainly appreciate a more direct and honest explanation and a consistent implementation across its API and own services (RSS, JavaScript widget).

Sadly Twitter has continued to set the mark for other developers and, like its infinite scroll and other user annoyances, it will continue to enable developers to make poor decisions that are counter to a good user experience.

Related

From Twitter

• About Twitter's Link Service (http://t.co)


• Twitter's t.co URL wrapper is now on for all URLs 19 characters and greater

My Posts about Link Shorteners

• URL Shortener Spam Overrunning Blogger Stats, Feb. 4, 2011


• You Get What You Pay For, Dec. 17, 2010


• Libya's Terror Plot: Link Rot (Linkpocalypse?), Oct. 11, 2010


• More News in the URL Shortener Market, Dec. 15, 2009


• List of URL Shorteners Grows Shortener, Oct. 5, 2009

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Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits

One of my un-fondest memories from my early days of web development was the constant client request for web site counters at the bottom of a new web site. Trying to explain to clients that showing a rather low number of visitors might not be something they want to brag about. And then I got the inevitable request to, like the sketchy used car dealer behind the warehouse, adjust the site counter ahead a few hundred thousand miles.

Today on the web services like Google Analytics, preceded by products like WebTrends, allow site owners to see the number of users visiting their sites without embarrassing themselves by displaying low numbers. These services have also allowed site owners to, for the most part, move past the goal of just getting hits on their sites and instead setting up better methods to track conversions — how many visits result in sales, or downloaded product, or filled out forms, or whatever the goal of the site is. Smart businesses aren't enticed by a count, they want to see numbers of qualified visitors.

So how do we not get this with social media?

I read an article earlier this week about a local firm doing good by helping local businesses to increase their Facebook "likes" (Buffalo Social Media Firm Focuses on Educating Local Clients). To be fair to the company being profiled, it's possible the writer just doesn't understand the business goals or what "educating clients" really means and did not provide sufficient context. When I see quotes like this I am more than a little surprised, given the boast of the article title:

"The key thing that a lot of people don't understand is it costs money if you want a 10,000 fan page. You've got to invest. You've got to run ads,” said Evanetski. Likes for the page have grown from around 450 before the ads launched to more than 1,700 by Sunday morning.

Nowhere does the article discuss just what those 1,700 fans actually mean for that business. Is the campaign over now, or are those fans being approached for more information, as sales opportunities, just for mining demographic data, or for something else? Educated clients should ultimately know that an increase in the number of people who follow / like / +1 them on a social media service in itself does not translate to anything. An educated client has a goal in mind and uses social media as one method to achieve that goal. If the goal is simply to garner fans and followers, then an opportunity is being missed.

I wrote about this very thing just a few days into 2010 — almost two years ago — and thought folks might catch on. It's worth a re-read: Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing. Seeing the reasons behind Newt Gingrich's absurdly high Twitter follower count (EXCLUSIVE: Twitter Analysis Vindicates Gingrich in Followers Scandal) should remind us all that such a high follower count is essentially meaningless, particularly if you've only cultivated followers who aren't prospects for your product or service.

If you are a business owner and are approached by firms offering to increase your Twitter follower count or Facebook likes (or other service-of-the-day verb-to-indicate-attention), just ask them, "Why?" The answer should include a tangible reference to your final goals for any marketing campaign. If it doesn't, then send them away.

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Recent(ish) News on Google, Bing, SEO/SEM

I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them "artists"). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that you should invest in the SEO vendor to do just that.

I also try hard not to spend too much time addressing the ever-changing landscape of the search engines, let alone focusing on just one of them. However, sometimes it's worth wrapping up some of the more interesting developments because they can genuinely affect my clients who aren't trying to game the search engines.

Content Farms and Site Scrapers

If you've spent any time searching through Google you may notice that sometimes you get multiple results on your search phrase that look the same in the results, but when visiting the site you find they are just ad-laden monstrosities with no value. Sometimes one of these spam sites would appear higher in the Google search results than the site from which the content was stolen.

Google has now taken steps to not only push those sites back down to the bowels where they belong, but also to penalize those sites. These changes started in late January and went through some more revisions at the end of last month.

I think it's fair to expect Google to keep tweaking these rules. Given all the sites that offer RSS feeds of their content (along with other syndication methods), it's likely that many sites integrate content from external sites into their own. The trick here will be for Google to recognize a site that has a original content that also syndicates third-party content from a site that has nothing but content taken from elsewhere. If you do syndicate content, then you should be sure to what you site stats and your ranking in the search results to see if you are affected at all.

Additional reading:

• Finding more high-quality sites in search


• Google Changes Algorithm To Penalize Site Scrapers


• Do You Republish Other People's Content? You'll Want to Read This


• Google Declares War on Content Farms


• Google Announces Massive Algorithm Change, Declares War On Content Farms, Including Demand Media

Page Titles

Perhaps you have spent a great deal of time carefully crafting your page titles (specifically the text that appears in the title and which displays in your browser title bar). Perhaps you have noticed that in Google the title you entered is not what appears on the search results page. This isn't a bug, doesn't mean your site was indexed improperly, and doesn't necessarily mean your page title had some other affect on your page rank. This is done intentionally by Google.

This does imply, however, that your titles are unwieldy. Google does this when titles are too short, when they used repeatedly throughout a site, or when they are stuffed with keywords. If you find that your title is being cut off (implying it's too long) then you may want to limit your title to 66 characters, or at least put the most important information in those first 66 characters.

Additional reading:

• Dynamic Title Snippets on SERPs


• When Google Rewrites Your Title Tags


• When Google Titles Don't Match Page Title

Social Media

It wasn't that long ago that Google and Bing said that links in social media (think Facebook and Twitter) will affect a site's position in search results (PageRank for Google). Some people may even be tempted to run out and post links to every social media outlet they can find, hoping that the more inbound links, the better for their site. Thankfully it's not that simple.

Both Google and Bing look at the social standing of a user when calculating the value of an inbound link. This can include number of followers (fans/friends on Facebook), number followed, what other content is posted, how much a user gets retweeted or mentioned and a few other factors. In short, those Twitter accounts that come and go in a matter of hours that tweet a thousand links into the ether aren't doing any good. A good social media strategy that is garnering success, however, should also give a boost to the sites it links.

What is not clear, however, is how URL shorteners (and which ones) affect the weight of those links.

Additional reading:

• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?


• The Straight Dope on Facebook, Twitter, and SEO


• Google + Bing Confirm that Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO

Random Bits

These are some random articles I collected for posts that never happened. I still think there's good stuff in these and warrant a few minutes to read.

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results and Bing: Why Google's Wrong In Its Accusations should be read together. The accusation from Google that Bing is stealing its search results is fascinating on its own, but reading Bing's response demonstrates a host of things Bing also does differently. For me it was an entertaining battle, but that's about it.

HuffPo's Achilles Heel discusses how Huffington Post relies on questionable SEO techniques, which I equate to spamming, and wonders how long the site will be viable if AOL isn't willing to keep up the SEO game as the rules change. It could be a great purchase for AOL, or a dead site full of brief article stubs.

Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality is a two-year-old article dealing with a twelve-year-old argument. And still relevant.

When A Stranger Calls: The Effect Of Agency Pitches On In-House SEO Programs should be particularly interesting to people who are charged with some form of SEO within an organization. Too often the unsolicited call or email comes in making grandiose promises and citing questionable data and results. This article provides a good position from which to push back and make sure you and your employer aren't taken to the cleaners.

A 3-Step SEO Copywriting Confession almost sounds like an admission of wrongdoing, but instead talks about how to structure your content for SEO without completely destroying it.

Additional reading (that I wrote):

• Negative Reviews Can Now Affect Site Rank Downward


• Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank


• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords

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Twitter As Passive-Aggressive Enabler

There was once a time that if you wanted to lodge a complaint with a company or organization, you could rely on writing a strongly-worded letter. You might get a response in 6-8 weeks. Then came a point when you could call a support line and speak to a human being and, for questions beyond a missing item from an order, your issue might have to go up the chain and you'd hear back in a week or two. Then email came about and a customer issue could be sent up the chain with a simple press of the "forward" button, reducing turnaround times to a day or two. Now there is Twitter, where a complaint directed at an organization's Twitter account, if not answered within a couple hours, is considered terrible customer service.

Forgetting all the companies that do it incorrectly (creating a Twitter account that only broadcasts, doesn't engage, and doesn't have a human personality behind it), there are organizations that have employed people to monitor social media (Facebook, blogs, etc.) to look for mentions of a company and, when negative, to proactively reach out to soothe the offended party.

My Own Recent Experience, Which You May Skip

I had my own experience lately where, after a painfully awful ecommerce experience, in my rage I tweeted how terrible it was and included the offender's Twitter handle. To the offender's credit, response was relatively swift for a Saturday afternoon. And then I realized that I had used Twitter to become a passive-aggressive whiner. The response from the offender only enabled that.

In an attempt to offset my poor behavior, I wrote up a very detailed email explaining the issues I encountered and sent it along to the offender's email address (I had already informed the offender it was coming). I asked for nothing in return — no free tickets, no special consideration. I followed up the email with a phone call a day for three days, never getting through to the offender's contact and never receiving a return call. What the offender did do, after my third call, is send me an email thanking me for my feedback and assurance that I would be taken care of. In addition, I received a friend request from this person on Facebook. A week later I received a voucher in the mail for two sets of free tickets, something I did not expect, and which even made me feel a bit guilty.

To the offender's credit, the response was swift and reparations were made that far outweighed the balance of my anger. But I never did get a human on the phone. I was relegated to an email-only exchange. Given the Facebook friend request, I couldn't understand why I was invited to connect with the representative personally when we had never exchanged words on the phone or face to face.

Anecdote Over, Now Back to the Meat

This entire experience got me thinking. I spent some time researching customer service in the context of Twitter. Comcast's own efforts have been a de facto standard for a couple years now, so it's easiest to explain the process through the lens of how Comcast started the ball rolling. Essentially, a very frustrated user complained about his Comcast connection on Twitter, and within twenty minutes received a call from an executive on the other side of the country. The guy who complained wrote up the story for TechCrunch and it became sort of a call-to-arms for companies who are playing social media and want to stand apart. You can read the full story in the post Comcast, Twitter And The Chicken (trust me, I have a point). Shortly after that article, ReadWriteWeb posted the article How to Get Customer Service via Twitter, which outlines how companies can and should monitor social media and how customers can leverage the platform.

This has enabled people to not reach out to a customer service phone number, a store manager, or make some other concerted effort, but instead to complain to the ether in the hopes someone is monitoring for such gripes. Often the complaint doesn't even warrant a response (is it really necessary to complain about the color of chairs?), but because it's so easy to do, the complaint comes out. Sometimes it's the equivalent to complaining that the steak was overdone, but only after you ate the entire thing (not just a tribute to Waiting, I have seen this in real life over and over). Organizations are rewarding these miniature rants by trying to soothe and ultimately offering something in return. And that rewards the people who gripe in this passive fashion, but not necessarily those who take more direct channels. It also means companies who are not monitoring social media may be unfairly judged as dismissive (does my local hardware store really need to be on Twitter?).

There will be times when the stewardess is a jerk. I don't expect the airline to give me free tickets as a result. Sometimes the waiter is in a bad mood, but I don't think I deserve a free dinner. My barista put too much foam on my latte? I'm so lazy I paid to have someone who is not me make it. The tech support rep doesn't have an electrical engineering degree and couldn't guess that a solder melted on my machine? Oh well, he can't peer across the phone lines into the hardware and see such things. I suck it up and recognize that these are real people with real lives, not mechanical protrusions of some corporate machine.

And yet too many of us feel entitled to being kept happy without reason. I'm not saying that life needs to be nasty, brutish and short, but it certainly can't be all rainbows and lollipops simply because we expect others to provide. Customer service (over)reaction on Twitter feeds this. People demand satisfaction quickly and out of balance with the issue. And when they get it, they talk about what a great experience they had, teaching others to use the same bad behavior to get their way.

Unfortunately, this builds on and reinforces behaviors that are already extant in our population. People pull out their cell phone cameras before calling 911 when they see a car accident. They take and post photos of their friends in compromising situations (which are usually nothing more than passing moments of poor timing and good photo framing). Couples engage in fights over text messages and forward responses to their friends. People maintain multiple Twitter accounts so they say what they really think about bosses/ex-lovers/family from a "stealth" account without fear of reprisal, or rather, fear of being honest and direct. These are all examples of how people give up their responsibility as a good neighbor to instead be the one to scoop the news, embarrass their friends, or win a pointless squabble. Unfortunately for so many who are not socially savvy, who rely only on examples of what the broad populace does, these cases only promote passive behavior — often passive aggressive behavior.

Perhaps if you are someone responsible for setting a policy of responding to complaints from Twitter you should consider getting the complainer on the phone. Usually, if it's worth complaining about, it should be worth spending a few minutes on the phone with a customer service rep. Those who resist are probably nothing more than whiners anyway. Sure, there is a risk that someone will complain publicly (blog, review site, etc), but you can demonstrate that you tried to reach out and were rebuffed. Maybe those aren't the customers you want anyway.

And if you find people engaging in other passive behaviors that involve you, perhaps the best thing you can do to ensure real and honest interaction down the road is to insist in face-to-face meetings or at least phone calls. When 44% of U.S. respondents to Opera's survey about mobile web use say they have asked someone out on a date via text message, it doesn't take much imagination to guess how those conversations go (lots of insincere "lol"s and other acronyms designed to give the asker a way out if the answer is a "no"). Perhaps instead of allowing people to text/Tweet you on a whim to get together, you should expect them to commit to it by making plans (gasp) a day or more in advance. Now you can take some comfort in the knowledge that you aren't getting the invite only after everyone else has declined.

Whether professionally or personally, don't be lured to the ease that Twitter (Facebook, et al) allows you to snipe. Make the effort to be direct and approach the subject of your ire. If you are on the other end addressing complaints, then don't fire back in the same medium. Reach out in the real world, showing that you care enough about the person or issue to make an effort. For both sides, don't hide behind the keyboard.

Related

• How Twitter will corrupt contact


• Social Media Responsibility

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You Get What You Pay For

First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, "You get that for which you pay" just doesn't roll off the tongue.

In the last week I have watched two free web services I use announce (in some fashion) that they are going away. This has caused a good deal of frustration and anger on behalf of users. And it's all just a repeat of things I have seen on the web for 15 years now.

I have watched the Brightkite blog, Facebook page and Brightkite/Twitter accounts get hammered with angry and abusive comments from users (Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.).

I have watched on Twitter as people have derided Yahoo's decision to shut down del.icio.us, the place where they have shared and stored bookmarks for years (Leaked Slide Shows Yahoo Is Killing Delicious & Other Web Apps at Mashable).

I felt vindicated when Google decided to pull the plug on Google Wave, partly owing to the fact that nobody could quite figure out how to wield something that was a floor wax and a dessert topping all in one (Google Wave is Dead at ReadWriteWeb).

I have watched as some of the URL shorteners on which we have come to rely for services like Twitter have announced that they are going away, or have just disappeared (List of URL Shorteners Grows Shortener).

I, and perhaps the entire web, breathed a sigh of relief when Geocities announced it was going to take a dirt nap — and finally did (Wait - GeoCities Still Exists?).

I remember when both Hotmail and Yahoo decided it was time to start charging for access to some of the more enhanced features of the free email they offered users (Say Goodbye to Free Email).

I saw people panic when they might lose access to all sorts of free video, photos, and even text content from CNN, Salon, and others (End of the Free Content Ride?).

We Get It; You've Been There, What's Your Point?

These services all have a couple key things in common:

1. Users have put a lot of time, energy, and apparently emotion into these services.


2. They are free.

The second point, in my opinion, should mitigate the first point. If you as a user are not paying to use a service, then is it a wise decision to build your social life or your business around it? Do you as a user not realize that these organizations owe you nothing?

As Brightkite announced the shuttering of its core service with only a week heads-up, they were kind enough to allow users to grab their data via RSS feeds. Yahoo hasn't even formalized the future of del.icio.us, but already fans have found a way to grab the data. But in both of these cases, if you as a user aren't backing up your data, keeping an archive, or storing it elsewhere, whose fault is it really that you might lose it all?

Is it wise to build a social media marketing campaign on Facebook, a platform notorious for changing the rules (features, privacy controls, layout, etc.) on a whim? Is relying on a free URL shortener service a good idea as the only method to present links to your highly developed web marketing campaigns? Should you really run your entire business on the features offered by Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc? If you have to alert staff/friends/partners to something important in a timely fashion, can you really trust Twitter to do what you need?

The culture of the web (nee Internet) has always been one of an open and sharing environment, where people and organizations post information that they understand will be shared/borrowed/stolen/derided. Somehow users of the web have come to expect that everything is, or should be, free. Look at the proliferation of sites to steal movies and music as an example on one end of the spectrum. On the other end is the reliance on Wikipedia by every school kid across the country instead of a purchased encyclopedia.

Let's all take some time to evaluate our plans and what we are doing. When that vendor who builds Facebook campaigns comes back to tell you that what he/she built last year won't work this year due to a Facebook change, there is your cost. When you have to take time from your real work to download all your bookmarks just so you can try to find a way to share them again or even get them into your browser, there is your cost. When you build a business on the back of a Twitter API and have to retool your entire platform due to an arbitrary change in how you call the service, there is your cost. When your Google Doc is sitting in "the cloud" and you're sitting in a meeting without wifi just before you have to present it, there is your cost.

This cost, however, ignores something that can't be measured on your end with dollars. The cost of sharing your personal information, your activities, your habits, are all your daily cost for using many of these services.

You may be under the impression that I have something against these free services. The use of this very blog should tell you otherwise. Instead I have something against users who have an expectation of free, top-notch service from organizations who are really only around as far as their cash flow can sustain them.

I keep my bookmarks on my local machine and just share the files between computers. I have been archiving my Brightkite photos since I started using the service, and archiving the posts to Twitter and Facebook, all the while backing up my Twitter stream. I use locally-installed software (MS Word, OpenOffice) writing to generic formats (RTF, etc.) and keep the files I need where I can access them (file vault on my site). I pay for a personal email service in addition to maintaining a free one. Other than Twitter, with its character limits, I avoid URL shorteners (and have no interest in rolling my own). I signed up for Diaspora in the hopes that I can funnel all my social media chaos to the one place I can take it with me. I keep a landline in my house so when the power goes out I can still make a phone call to 911.

I don't tweet my disgust when Facebook changes its layout. I don't post angry comments on Brightkite's wall when they kill a service. I don't try to organize people to take their time to rebuild Google Wave when I cannot. I don't punch my co-worker when he buys me a sandwich and the deli failed to exclude the mayo.

Let's all take some personal responsibility and stop relying solely on something simply because it's free. Your favorite free thing is different or gone (or will be). Suck it up and move on.

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