Sneak Peek at Foursquare’s New Logo
In: Social Media
11 Mar 2010
Disclaimer: This is intended as parody and humor only. I mention this for the benefit of any of you who may be too dense to recognize parody when you see it.
Ashton Kutcher Talks Wife Demi into Getting Twitter Tattoo on Her… Chest?
In: Social Media| Twitter
8 Mar 2010We all know that Ashton Kutcher and his wife, Demi Moore, have a real thing for Twitter, but I think this is taking things a bit too far.
Think Twice About Selling Advertising in Your Twitter Stream
In: Twitter
22 Feb 2010There are several companies set up specifically to buy and sell ad space on our Twitter accounts. In most cases you sign up and agree to let them feed their pre written ads into your Twitter stream. What they are willing to pay you for that privilege depends on how popular you are and how often you tweet. It was recently reported that Kim Kardashian receives as much as $10,000 for some paid tweets even though she denies the claim.
The screen shot below illustrates why you’ll want to be very careful about what service you use if you decide that this seems like a good way to make some extra cash. Most of the services I’ve checked out provide a way for you to select general categories that you’ll accept ads from but don’t provide a way for you to specifically choose the advertisers.
I’m quite sure the person who’s account this tweet was sent from didn’t actually send the tweet. For one thing, the account holder is male and his Twitter page is used to provide information about online marketing, it’s not a typical spam account that you would expect to see this type of thing from. My guess is that he’s using an advertising service to insert paid ads into his Twitter stream and in this case, the ad does not fit his audience and actually linked to a porn style dating site.
My guess is that he’ll be hearing complaints from his followers, probably lose several, and will shortly be posting an apology if he’s smart. If he’s real smart, he’ll dump the ad service and find other ways to make money.
Photo of Tiger Woods Hints at Possible Twitter Endorsement
In: Twitter
19 Feb 2010Once again I’ve managed to come into possession of some earth shattering information (paparazzi photo) that has yet to be leaked to the press (don’t ask me how) and although it’s possible Tiger Woods is just a huge fan of Twitter, I’m wondering if I’ve got a scoop here and Tiger is about to announce a major new endorsement deal. It sure looks like it’s something Tiger doesn’t want anyone to talk about.
Dear Facebook; No, I do not want to know every time someone becomes friends with someone else!
In: Facebook| Social Media
14 Feb 2010And no, I do not want my friends to know every time I friend someone, become a fan, or join a group. It’s no more their business than it is mine to know what they’re doing.
Am I the only one who’s getting sick and tired of a Facebook news feed that looks like the screen shot below?
You know what this is exactly like? It’s like going to a huge party and having someone grab you after every conversation, telling you that, “Sue and Mike just became friends with John”, and “Jason and Jennifer just started playing Monopoly” and “Bob, Sue, Chris and Justin are attending church” and “Pat, Tom, Jeff and Erin just joined Green Peace” and “Jason and Christy are big Beyonce fans” and…
We used to have the option of turning off notifications that would show up on our friend’s feeds but Facebook deleted that option in December when they changed their privacy policy and exposed all of us to the world without our permission. I want that option back and you should too and you should be demanding it back along with me.
Edit: I’ve started using a very nice little Firefox add-on called Better Facebook that eliminates the who friended who notifications from my news feed which alleviates one problem, but until Facebook gives us back control of who we allow to see what we’re doing I think I’m going to stop updating my personal Facebook page and stick to my fan page.
You can get the Firefox add-on, Better Facebook, here. I recommend the GreaseMonkey version.
Getting Creative with QR Barcodes; Funny Little Graphics That Contain a Lot of Information
In: Social Media
10 Jan 2010
See that funny little black and white graphic up there next to my logo? That’s called a QR code. These mobile barcodes are big in Japan and slowly catching on in the west. If you’re not familiar with them yet, they’re the equivalent of the more common line barcodes, but they can be used for a lot more than just identifying products on packaging. For example, if you shoot that QR code next to my logo with your mobile phone’s bar code reader it will give you the link to this blog. A handy way to add my blog url on your mobile phone without having to type it in.
You can get a barcode/QR reader for just about any phone with a camera and there are several apps available for iPhones and Android devices.
Many websites are using QR codes to give direct access to software or apps to download. They can be used to deliver short text messages too, so you could add one to your business card or even store the image on your phone and someone at a convention would simply scan the image on your mobile phone and instantly have all the information you’d normally provide on your business card, including a clickable link to your website. How about having one printed on a t-shirt that provides a link to your Twitter account with the words, “Follow me on Twitter”. Just think how much attention you ladies will draw at a tweetup when everyone is taking pictures of your chest.
Check out my Twitter page and you’ll see that I’ve added one to my background that when scanned displays the message, “Please visit my blog at http://hughbriss.com” and the link is clickable.
If you’d like to create a custom QR code for yourself there are several websites that offer the service. Two that I like are Qurify and Kawa.
The few ideas I’ve mentioned in this post are just the tip of the iceberg and I can’t wait to see just what creative uses QR codes will be put to. Please show us examples of uses you’ve come across in the comments.
When you sign up for a Twitter account you need to choose a password and hopefully you picked one that isn’t easy to guess, like your name, or something really dumb like password or 123456, but did you know that Twitter has a list of banned passwords that you’re not allowed to use? Many of them make sense, like the aforementioned examples, and some of them are naughty words, but the list of 370 words also contains some words that have me baffled.
Here are some of the banned words and although they aren’t exactly smart passwords I wonder why they made the list. Perhaps they’ve just been used too many times.
access14, apples, bond007, canada, cocacola, coffee, dallas, einstein, ferrari, flower, gators, golfer, iloveyou, monster, ncc1701, startrek, steelers, success, twitter
So, according to Twitter, apples are bad but oranges are okay; Canada is bad but Mexico is okay; CocaCola is bad but Pepsi is okay; coffee is bad but tea is okay; Dallas is bad but Houston is okay; Einstein is bad but Hawking is okay; ILoveYou is bad but IHateYou is okay; Gators are bad but Seminoles are okay; Ferrari is bad but Maserati is okay; hooters are bad but boobs are okay; StarTrek is bad but CaptainKirk is okay; Steelers are bad but Patriots are okay; success is bad but failure is okay.
The one that surprised me the most? Twitter is bad but Facebook is okay.
Now I’m not trying to start anything here, I’m just sayin’.
To see the entire list of 370 words banned by Twitter as passwords just go to the sign up page, view source and search for “banned”.
Credit: TechCrunch
Twitter Image is Now Social Identities
In: Twitter
11 Dec 2009
For those of you who don’t know, I own and operate a website called TwitterImage.com. When this whole crazy thing started a short time ago, we (Twitter Image) began by designing backgrounds for Twitter, but as we grew, we added more social networks and now design backgrounds and custom graphics not only for Twitter, but for Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Ning and every social network page that can be customized. This led us to begin searching for a way to segue to a new name that encompassed all that we do and not only Twitter specifically, so we registered and began using the domain, SocialIdentities.com.
Enter the fine folks from Twitter.
Although we had begun to use SocialIdentities.com as a landing page that redirected visitors to our individual websites, we were still using the name Twitter Image for our primary website. However, a few days ago we received an email from Twitter asking us to stop using the name Twitter Image as they felt it created some confusion and some people may have assumed that our site was operated by Twitter… even though we do not use any design elements or colors that should have created any visual inference that this was the case.
So, since we have no wish to rock the boat and considering that Twitter did agree to let us continue using the word Twitter in our domain — as long as it did not appear in front — we have changed the URL of our site to CustomBackgroundsForTwitter.com and have Twitter’s blessing to use that URL. However, although that URL will be great for SEO, it’s too long to be of any realistic use for branding, so we will use the name Social Identities in the logo of our site. It will be possible to get to our website from either SocialIdentities.com or CustomBackgroundsForTwitter.com.
