Tag: Twitter

Smile with “Рождеством Христовым”

A couple of days ago DailyPost suggest the following topic for a blog post: Share something that makes you smile.  I wanted to share something, but so many things make me smile that it’s hard to choose.  Today though I came across something that made me smile, and even laugh.  It’ll take me a bit to explain, so please bear with me.  And if you choose not to, here is an entertaining and short explanation of “bear with me” versus “bare with me”.

Anyway, here we go with the facts:

  1. It’s just after the midnight on January 7th.
  2. Russia, as well as some other countries, celebrate Christmas on January 7th, and not on December 25th.  Wikipedia explains why.
  3. “Merry Christmas” in Russian is “С Рождеством Христовым”.

So, what we have right now is a lot of Russian-speaking people sending “С Рождеством Христовым” via any means possible to a lot of other people.  One of those means is Twitter.  One of many Twitter features is Trending Topics (aka TT).  This is an automatically generated list of most common phrases used across Twitter in some recent period of time (like an hour or two).  And as so many other automated features, this one has its side effects.

Firstly, it seems that it doesn’t much care for the language or alphabet.  It grabs any frequently used phrase in any language or any alphabet, puts it in the list of trending topics, and shows it to any user, no matter what his location or preferred language is.

Secondly, it seems that it tries to minimize the phrase by removing very short words.  Like those consisting of only one or two characters.

So what we have by now is “Рождеством Христовым”, and not “С Рождеством Христовым”.  And that phrase is a number one trending topic, shown to all Twitter users everywhere.  Here is a screenshot.

Here starts the fun.  Most people who see this, have no idea what is it all about.  Many of those, who are trying to find out get confused by incorrect spelling and by the fact that Christmas is over already for most of the world.  That I find funny.

But that’s not all.  Since the phrase went up to trending topics,  it got a lot of special attention.  Humor.  Some people started spreading rumors.  For example, that “Рождеством Христовым” is the name of the new Russian nuclear bomb.  Some others started using the phrase in famous quotes.  For example, “I love the smell OF Рождеством Христовым in the morning!” (original quote talks about napalm and is from the movie “Apocalypse Now”).  That I find hilarious.  You can have a look yourself at everything that has been tweeted with this phrase.

And even that is not all.  Twitter has been known for having hard times during activity spikes.  Today is just one of such spikes.  So Twitter is unstable, falling over the edge.  And when it does so, it shows the famous Fail Whale.

This is cute and worth a smile, but there is still more to the story.  The meaning of Fail Whale varies between people.  Mashable once published an interview with the designer of the image.  While I know the background of this image, I can’t help a different association.  The one that Denis Lebel mentioned in the comment to that interview – the story of the Sperm Whale from Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Universe.

It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity.

Innocent “Merry Christmas” wishes, weird Cyrillic letters shown to the whole world, rumors of nuclear war from Russian, word play with famous quotes, Twitter outages, and flying whales – I find the mix hilarious.  I hope you do too.

P.S.: To all those of you celebrating – Merry Christmas and С Рождеством Христовым.

Twitter is not a social network

Just a couple of days ago I had a discussion with a friend of mine about Twitter.  He is not too much into social networks, but hearing all the time about Twitter, he decided to give it a shot again, and still felt that it was in no way suitable for him.  Normally, that would be enough for me to jump into my zealotical advocacy mode.  However this time I felt different.  I said that I’m not all that hot about Twitter anymore as I used to be.

You see, back in a day, Twitter had two things important to me, that it lost on the way to where it is now.  The first one was SMS gateway.  People could interact with Twitter via SMS.  This was important to me, because I could practically get anybody register at Twitter.  My grandparents know how to send SMS, using their pre-historic mobile phones.  Also, SMS coverage is way better, more reliable, and cheaper than any mobile Internet connection.  Unfortunately, Twitter limited its SMS gateway from global coverage to only a selection of countries (US, UK, etc), which don’t include the countries where I or my friends and family live.  A huge disappointment.

Secondly, back in a day, Twitter was about status updates.  That was partially enforced by the SMS user interface, where you just couldn’t assume that everyone has a browser nearby or even an Internet connection.  So the messages were more of the text and less of the links.  With SMS gateway going away, and with plenty of online marketing and PR people joining Twitter, this was also gone.  Now, most Twitter messages contain a link to an external resource.

I think that that also changed the culture of a place.  Before, 140 character limitation had a very good reason to be in place – that’s how many characters there are in an SMS message.  People were encouraged to formulate their updates within this limit.  Now that Twitter updates are mostly links, nobody cares about that limit.  Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters, when I can use as much of them as I want and just tweet a link to my text?

So, if it’s not a social network with status updates anymore, what is it?  A news source?  But we had RSS for that, didn’t we?  Yes, we did, and we still do.  But RSS works differently.  RSS is more of a source-based system.  You pick your sources that you trust and want to follow – CNN, Slashdot, etc – and you subscribe to their RSS feed.  This will make sure that you get all published items, whether you are online or not.  If you’ve got a new interest or hobby – just find a few more sources of wisdom and subscribe to their RSS feeds.  Handling too much?  Just unsubscribe from some and you done.

Twitter is different.  It’s not so much as a source-based system, but an event-based system.  It doesn’t matter who you follow and what your interests are.  If something happens, you’ll know about it on Twitter.  A gadzillion people will tweet and re-tweet about it, and you will eventually catch it.  Or you can search for keywords that you have interest in, and then it will work very much like Google Alerts, letting you know about tweets that matched, no matter who or where posts them.

I am, personally, not a big news person.  I don’t care much about news.  What I care about are opinions and thoughts about news.  So for me personally, Twitter is not that interesting, because it only tells me what happens.  Slashdot and a collection of my other two hundred or so feeds tell me what happened and what people think about it.

For the last year or so, I only new that I am floating away from Twitter.  Yes, it’s there.  Yes, it’s getting more and more popular.  Yes, I’m pushing a bunch of links to it too – my blog posts announcements, some delicious bookmarks, an YouTube favorites.  Occasionally I even tweet a thought or a quote.  But I don’t read and follow it as much as I used to.  For the last couple of weeks or so, I was trying to figure out why, and now I think I have.

But until today that was only me and my thoughts.  Today however I got a confirmation of my thoughts being in the right direction.

Kevin Thau, Twitter’s VP for business and corporate development, announced during a presentation at Nokia World 2010 today that everyone’s favorite micro-blogging network is not actually a social network.

It’s not, you say?

No, says Thau: Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information.

ReadWriteWeb is one of many resources reporting from Nokia World 2000.

How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR

I’ve seen this website some time ago and then was looking for it and couldn’t find it.  Now that I came across it again, I shall post it here for everyone to know.

HowToUseTwitterForMarketingAndPR.com

Enjoy, share, and make sure you forward it to your marketing and PR departments, so that nobody is missing out.  Really.

More social, less social

I just wanted to let you all know about the latest changes to this site.

Firstly, I removed the Latest Twits widget from the sidebar.  Somehow I am not using Twitter all that much lately.  I still love the service, but I have two problems with it.  Actually, it’s one, but I feel it in two separate ways.  Firstly, I still don’t have a good Twitter client application.   Not on my mobile, and not on my desktop.  I tried a billion of them, and I am yet to find one that suits me.  Without a proper client, I tend to forget to tweet, read other tweets, and respond.  Too bad.   Second problem is that I am annoyed by all the links that are posted in tweets these days.  Sometimes I just want to get the statuses only, to see how my friends are doing and what they are up to.  Instead I get a billion links, which I need to click, check, and follow.  As I said, I wish I could filter them out in my Twitter client, for those times when I have more time and better Internet connection.  The blog will still send the “new blog post” tweets to Twitter though, and I am still trying my best to use the service.  It’s just that judging by all the updates I do, the sidebar space can be used better.

Secondly, I added Google Reader shared items to the sidebar.  Google Reader is the application I use a lot!  And I share quite a bit of stuff.  Too bad it often goes unnoticed.  Sharing those links and articles via sidebar might give an extra bit of attention to those things that I think deserve it.  Just in case you are wondering which plugin I used – it’s Google Reader Widget by James Wilson.

Thirdly, I added some social network buttons in the upper-right corner of the website.  These are links to some of my other online profiles and also and easy way to bookmark, share, and promote either the whole website or a specific page that you liked.  The plugin that I used for this functionality is Fixed Social Buttons by Ioane.