Alliance Blog Reviews

I’ve posted before about how certain features can improve your twitter experience. These required a lot of research. After reading hundreds of blog posts, I’ve gained a new appreciation of twitter applications.  One of them is The T wit Cleaner. I primarily use the web interface. I leave tweetdeck on when I’m busy but I’ll use the web to really dive into conversations. I follow over 1000 and,  despite being really picky with my return follows, started to find my friends where getting drowned out. I needed help but didn’t want to spend hours manually going through my list. This is where The Twit Cleaner literally saved my twitter stream. What is the twit cleaner? The Twit Cleaner i s an app by @sidawson that is designed to help clean out your twitter account. According to the FAQ , “it gets your following list, then analyses the profiles & tweets of every single one of those people, looking for certain patterns of behaviour (people not talking, being over repetitive, posting the same links repeatedly, etc).” I’ve run this a couple of times and, frankly, its awesome. Note: The account @twitcleaner isn’t associated with this – you have to make sure to @reply thetwitcleaner . How does it work? The whole process is really simple. First, you have to click the button to request your report. Note that there is a box which, if left checked, will send out a tweet telling your friends about The Twit Cleaner . You are under no obligation to tweet anything. You will then get shown a pop up asking if the application has your permission to access your account. This is safe. I have many friends that develop apps and they only need the information to give you the information you need. You will shortly get sent a DM linking to your report. There is an example report on the about page . Yours will look different and some of the names have changed. Thats cool. That picture was designed to help you understand it better. The report will contain a list of potentially dodgy accounts. Now – just because someone is on a list, doesn’t mean that they are dodgy. I will explain this further, but it just means that they fall into a certain category of behaviors. The main categories are: Dodgy – spam phrases, @ spamming, duplicate links etc Absent – No updates in a month, or fewer than 10 tweets. Repetitive – High numbers of duplicate tweets or links Flooding – So high volume you can’t see anyone else Non-Responsive – No interaction & those that follow back < 10% Everyone is free to use twitter in their own way. Not all of these behaviors are bad. Some people are travelling and thus aren’t on twitter for an extended period of time. Some people use the platform primarily to broadcast. The Twit Cleaner organizes people into subcategories so you can easily choose who you want to unfollow. In my summary, I have a section saything ‘These accounts ignore you.’ Within that, users fall into 3 subcategories. Hardly follow anyone Don’t interact with anyone Have fewer than 10 tweets. Each section is broken up like this. Based on the report, it is really easy to make a decision about who you want to unfollow. This process is really easy. There are two options. You can use the data to manually unfollow people or you can let The Twit Cleaner do it for you. You are given four options: Only unfollow those I don’t select Unfollow the spammy and absent, keep the rest Unfollow the spammy, keep the rest Unfollow the absent, keep the rest. I suggest you use whatever option feels right for you. I always choose to unfollow the users I don’t select. This is time consuming but ensures you don’t accidentally unfollow people. Selecting someone is easy. You just have to click their avatar. Their icon will show up as shaded and that person wont be unfollowed. How much does it cost? Surprisingly, the report itself is free. There is a small charge if your total follow count is over 2000. The prices are: Up to 25,000 – $5 USD Up to 50,000 – $10 USD Otherwise – $20 USD These are very reasonable prices considering what you get. Mini Interview with Si Dawson I was fascinated by this application and so, took the opportunity to ask Si a few questions about The Twit Cleaner . I hope this gives you an insight to what goes on behind the scenes of 1. This was super easy and really thorough. Why did you choose to offer it for free instead of charging? The report is always free. I do charge a small sum if you follow more than 2000 people & want to get us to auto-unfollow for you. 90% of twitter users follow fewer than 2000 people, so for the vast majority of people, the entire process is free. For larger lists, I figured once people saw how useful the report was & how much time it would save them, they’d be happy to pay. The charge is primarily to cover costs on larger reports. For people with massive lists (20k+) it can take literally hours on a quad processor box to do all that analysis. I did have one report that ran for three days. It’s a LOT of work. 2. How much work went into creating and maintaining the twit cleaner? I’d say I’ve spent somewhere in the order of 1500 hours to date. Eg, last night I worked until 5am, & was up again at 9 to deal with tech support issues, minor hiccups etc. That goes on seven days a week. It’s pretty full on. 3. How does using this application improve your twitter experience? I designed it because I tried some auto-follow tools (keyword following, that sort of thing) & quickly start to dread looking at Twitter. There was so much noise, so much junk. The Twit Cleaner categorises everyone you’re following into common groupings – people that just post links, people that never talk to anyone. Those that are just blasting noise out, & not authentically engaging with anyone, oh, & the pure out spammers, & so on. So, by seeing these groupings, it then becomes very easy to go “You know what? I’m actually not interested in following that kind of person.” In my case, I got rid of all the spammers, the link feeds & so on. When I got up the next morning I looked at Twitter, & suddenly it was -interesting- again. It went from 90% noise to 90% interesting stuff. Stuff I liked, information that was interesting to me. It was always there, but I just couldn’t see it because of all the crap. My follow list dropped by about 30% but my enjoyment went up 500%! 4. Do you plan to create more apps that will help the twitter community? I have a couple more apps in the imediate pipeline, yes. Obviously there are some bits of the site that are still a bit average. The functionality is good on the report, for example, but the UI needs to be slicked up quite a lot. So, there’s that. The other things is this – calling in The Twit Cleaner is kind of an emergency situation. Things have gone mad, & you need to get them back under control again. Wouldn’t it be better to not need it in the first place? So, one app (which I already have early beta versions of, but isn’t quite ready for public rollout), is a clean followback – which follows anyone that follows you, but filters them according to the algorithms (so you’ll never follow any spammers). Another is clean keyword searching. So, following people that use certain keywords – all very common already – but again, filtered by the algorithms. You’ll be able to choose which categories you’re interested in following or not. Using these two give you all the power to grow your list & respond to the community, but keep it clean & high value at the same time. I have some even more exciting stuff I’ve been testing out, but it’s too early to talk about that just yet. Suffice to say, it’ll completely revolutionise finding quality people on Twitter. I’m very excited about it. Over to you: Have you used any applications to clean up your twitter account? What was your experience like? Also, if you have any questions about The Twit Cleaner just leave them in the comments. Disclosure: The developer, Si Dawson , is a friend of mine. However I didn’t know that he created this, or that he was a coder, until after using the service. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Review of The Twit Cleaner

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Review of The Twit Cleaner

Two weeks ago, it looked like Google might have been . . . well, fibbing. Back in June, the search engine announced that they would no longer redistribute “link juice” around nofollowed links , effectively deprecating the practice of PageRank sculpting. But late last month, it looked like the technique was still effective when SEOmoz published some research to that effect. Not so much, it turns out. Today, Mozzer Danny Dover revisits the tests he used in the original post and shows that the results were, in fact, inconclusive . The short reason is that the test didn’t include enough data to be statistically significant. He’d have to repeat the test with 168 domains (instead of the 20 he used) to assure that the results were meaningful and not merely a fluke. Apparently, there’s been some backlash against Danny and SEOmoz for their innaccurate information. Danny didn’t realize his error until Darren Slatten corrected him in the comments two days after the post had gone live. Naturally, it was too late to unring the bell—and a number of people were very upset that SEOmoz would post something misleading or outright wrong. In his correction post, Danny points out that this is just another example of the power of the Internet. I think it’s good that Danny did more than just update the old post, also publishing a new post to correct the misinformation (and apologize). Two weeks after the correction is fairly quick to reanalyze the data, though it’s possible he could have acted even faster. This is also a microstudy on reputation management and transparency, something we’re a little passionate about around here. As a reminder, back in August, Matt Cutts told SEOmoz that it’d be okay to keep nofollow links in place, though when building new sites or redesignin old ones, PageRank sculpting shouldn’t be a consideration. What do you think? Did everyone handle this situation well?

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Google Didn’t Lie After All

It looks like Deutschland has a bee in its bonnet about Google. Apparently it is using the dreaded M word “monopol” which, according to Google’s own translation tool is the German form of the English word monopoly. The Germans are concerned that Google is looking like Microsoft and they are not happy. Somebody needs to get in their Mercedes and take a ride on the Autobahn to cool off, maybe? We learned of the Reuters report from Search Engine Land . Apparently the German justice minister is upset that Google isn’t transparent enough. I thought monopolies are about cornering markets and not transparency but maybe I am missing something in the translation. Here’s her thoughts from Reuters In an interview with weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she was concerned the firm was accruing too much power and information about citizens via programmes like Google Earth and Google Books. “All in all, what’s taking shape there to a large extent is a giant monopoly, similar to Microsoft,” the minister said. “My initial response is not to ban something or stop something. But I do want to create more transparency and ensure that users know what is going on with their data,” she added. “I think the companies have an obligation here, and a lot of things ought to be improved. If that doesn’t happen soon we may have to take action as legislators.” Once again I have to ask the question does Google actually monopolize anything? According to Dictionary.com monopoly is: a board game in which a player attempts to gain a monopoly of real estate by advancing around the board and purchasing property, acquiring capital by collecting rent from other players whose pieces land on that property. Oooops. Wrong one. Here’s the one that works for our purposes here: 1. exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices. 2. the market condition that exists when there is only one seller. I think this is where people are getting confused. Microsoft and the desktop smelled of monopoly because no one else could play. Google, on the other hand, is not the only player in nearly everything it has its tentacles in. It just does things bigger and, most times, better than the rest. That’s called cleaning the competition’s clock, not a monopoly. I am sure there will be plenty of arguments that Google is a monopoly and I welcome all of them here. Just be sure that when you are using Google and monopoly in the same sentence you are not just complaining that Google does more things and they do them better. They have to prevent competition from taking place to be a real monopoly and I don’t see that like others might. Did you hear Google cry that Lycos, AltaVista and Yahoo were “monopolies” when it was in its infancy and seen as the new kid on the block with the goofy name? Nope. They went out and did things the old fashioned way: they innovated and gave the public what they wanted and in the process laid waste to things that didn’t work as well as they did. If that’s a monopoly then I’m all for it.

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Germany Cries Monopoly and Doesn’t Even Collect $200

How many times have you heard it said in business (or anywhere for that matter) that how you respond to a problem is more important than the problem itself? It’s said over and over again because it’s simply good advice. Well, Google had a chance to practice that principle last night when it began sending out e-mails to those with listings in the Local Business Center. Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz reports of the issues that occurred . Starting last night, Google began sending out the monthly (or so) Google Local Business Center updates. The updates go out via email and contain analytical information about how many times a listing was viewed, clicked on, and other miscellaneous analytics. The analytics are a summary of what they would see in their Google LBC analytics dashboard. But instead of these emails going to their actual business owners, they went to the wrong business owners. Schwartz received information for a business that was 1,500 mile from his location and he was not the only one having the experience. To Google’s credit they recognized the error and set things straight as quickly as one might expect. The following was sent to Barry so he could help the rest of us get some clarity on the issue. Of course, it doesn’t hurt your ability to get these kinds of responses when you are the News Editor of Search Engine Land. In other words, not everyone received the following explanation right away. As you’re aware, we send a monthly newsletter to our Local Business Center users, featuring product news and a glimpse at the Dashboard statistics which show the traffic Google properties drive to their listing. Shortly after sending the newsletter to a small portion of our users last night, we discovered that some emails included incorrect business listing information. We promptly stopped sending any further emails and investigated the cause, which we found to be a human error while pulling together the newsletter content. We’d like to sincerely apologize to all the business owners impacted and assure all our users that we’re working hard to ensure that nothing similar will happen again. Oh no! It appears that there may be a Googler who is, gulp, human and made a mistake. Of course it would never be one of the thousands of faithful servers around the world, it had to be one of those pesky human thingys. All kidding aside, as Schwartz points out, the data is pretty innocuous. It could even be looked at as a sideways form of advertising to a very small market because now people know about a business somewhere else that they never heard of before. Google later sent an automated reply to all those impacted by this glitch and it appears that all is well in the world again. While I would rather not have something like this happen I have to give Google credit for calling themselves on the error and working to make it right. Hopefully, any of the business owners who got the wrong data would treat one of their mistakes with the same approach. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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For Google Maps It’s Not the Problem but How You Handle It

Google Analytics is one of the most robust offerings by the search giant and it manages to fly under the radar a little bit. It has almost become ubiquitous for a large number of companies that are not prospects for other analytics packages like Omniture, Coremetrics, Webtrends etc. Many will even run it concurrently with these other players that have one distinct and major difference compared to Google’s offering: they cost money. Now, many people rail against the amount of data that Google has at its disposal as a result of their analytics offering ( formerly Urchin ). That’s fine and is great fodder for the Google conspiracy theory set, which is a pretty active community. On the street level though it is hard (read: impossible) to find a more robust offering that is free (another bone of contention for Google haters so go ahead and let’er rip). Well, Google is not resting on its laurels as it has announced a new feature that allows for users of the program to include annotations on reports. Search Engine Land tells us Following October’s release of Google Analytics new features, Google has just released another set of very cool new features. Among them is “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity. The annotations feature basically allows users to make comments on graphs regarding events that happened on specific days. Here is an example of what can be done with the annotation feature: The idea here is that there can be real collaboration between those who put together campaigns and those who see the analytics without that important data. There is nothing more dangerous than an upper level executive that sees a spike or a dip on a graph but has no idea that there may have been very good business reasons for why that type of traffic or conversion or whatever pattern exists. A simple note that outlines a “cause and effect” for the data consumer can save a lot of time and trouble. Daniel Waisberg of Search Engine Land points out some great scenarios where this could be useful The PPC team can announce major changes to their campaigns. The SEO team can annotate changes to the website so that results can be tracked over time. The PR team can update dates of events, enabling the tracking of offline activities into Google Analytics more easily. The media buying team can provide updates of major banner campaigns. As per usual Google does a pretty good job on its blog showing how this feature is implemented as well a other additions to the analytics tool. Here’s to a 2010 full of real communication and good cheer!

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Google Analytics Adds Annotation Feature

Ad.ly is an ad network for Twitter. You set your price and approve the targeted ads before they’re inserted (marked as ads) into your Twitter stream . And now, Ad.ly is adding analytics to its platform. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr to analyze participating publishers’ followers, as well as how they receive ads. The analytics offer information on user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly founder Sean Rad said the analytics, “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.” As with all user-based social media advertising, there have been a number of ethical and practical questions floating around Ad.ly. Would a service like this increase the noise in the stream? Would it turn off or even drive away followers? Now users are better equipped to understand how their followers interact with their sponsored tweets. What do you think? Would you use Ad.ly? What kind of analytic data would you need to help you evaluate the service?

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Sponsored Tweets from Ad.ly Add Analytics

No wonder I have had this feeling lately that I am always full and the waistline is expanding a bit. It’s all this information and data that I am ingesting on a daily basis. Boy, if only limiting my data intake time would make the waistline go away I’d be there in a heartbeat but I digress. We all know that the average person is taking in more information on a daily basis than ever before but just how much is too much? According to the New York Times : The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego . According to calculations in the report, that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words. Phew! Sounds like a lot of stuff to stuff in. Now to be fair, this amount of information is not exclusively confined to the online space. The study looks at television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. Now, I am not an online gamer so that last one has me a little bit confused since that activity often appears to serve the opposite effect of draining someone’s brain so feel free to yell at me and tell me I am wrong. Television (another fine brain extraction tool which has done its damage on me over the years) takes up the first place in time committed daily that creates information overload clocking in at 5 hours a day. Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day. The computer comes in third, at just under two hours a day. Video games take up about an hour, and reading takes up 36 minutes. While the report says that the printed word gets less attention the reality is that people are reading more than ever because of their online habits. Also, there is the phenomenon of much of this activity happening simultaneously as in texting while watching TV. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. As Internet marketers these studies are important because there is just a ridiculous amount of competition for peoples’ attention. The resulting din of data and noise makes it even more important to find a way to get people at a time when THEY are ready to hear your message. The old intrusive selling model is growing less and less effective because people actually control their time more than ever as it relates to media. They engage when they want to engage where they want to engage. It used to be that you take what you get. Those days are gone. So what is your technique to cut through the noise? Is the level of noise going to continue to increase thus making it more daunting to cut through or will there come a time when a person says “I can’t eat another gig!” What’s your take?

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TMI? Americans Take In 34 Gigs of Data A Day