From the monthly archives:

August 2011

Why smart people post dumb tweets

August 31, 2011

Each of us has a kind of inner measuring stick that tells us when we’re doing something foolish or out-of-character. But there is a problem we overlook. Comic Emo Philips explains it succinctly: “I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, well, look what’s telling [...]

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Twitter, quit telling us to check status when you don’t use it properly

August 31, 2011

When your home timeline freezes, Twitter shows you this message: The problem? Twitter isn’t posting status updates at Twitter Status regularly. In fact, sometimes they don’t post anything there at all! Even when Twitter support over and over again reports a problem, nothing appears on the Twitter Status page. Even when third-party sites not related to Twitter show [...]

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It’s Tuesday, so Twitter is down

August 30, 2011

Nearly 60% of Twitter’s problems in 2011, as reported at status.twitter.com, have happened within 24 hours of any given Tuesday (58.2%). And of those, half happen exactly on Tuesday. Of the rest, most happen within 24 hours of any given Friday (38.2%). Fully 80% of Twitter’s problems as reported at status.twitter.com in 2011 happened on a [...]

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Is your blog so bad it’s untweetable?

August 30, 2011

Every day I find blog posts with information I’d like to share…but can’t because the blog is so bad. Often it’s the writing. I tolerate poor writing by non-English speakers if the content is really good, and defend my choice to people who write in and say “That tweet you sent had bad writing.” But [...]

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The “bet with my boss” scam. Please do NOT retweet it

August 28, 2011

The “bet with my boss” tweet scam (see bottom of this post) gets people to retweet to help someone make their boss pay for doubting the power of Twitter! However, it’s a scam. People (and some spambots) are just copying a tweet that they’ve seen has worked for other people in order to get more [...]

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What to do when you see a hijacked account alert

August 27, 2011

You’ve probably seen one of these kind of messages before: Here is a list of all the most recent #Alerts about hijacked accounts. So, what happened? Why are these tweets being sent out? What should you do? Someone you follow had their account hijacked When you receive one of these tweets or DMs, it is from [...]

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Did you know Twitter hides some tweets, preventing you from eavesdropping?

August 27, 2011

Did you know Twitter hides some tweets from you? You can still see them if you do a Twitter search, or look at someone’s Twitter page (e.g. twitter.com/username), or set up a Twitter client such as TweetDeck to show you everything. But you won’t see all of the tweets from people you follow in your [...]

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How I failed on Twitter, and how I’m changing

August 27, 2011

My mission as TweetSmarter is broken down into three objectives, which I’ve listed below. I’ve also include my rating of how good a job I think I’ve been doing: ► Where I failed 1. Connect you to people that help (D+) The two things I’ve failed the most at are: Staying in touch with great [...]

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How Twitter got 29% more people to sign up

August 25, 2011

Many people have heard of Twitter. Few understand its value. A couple of Twitter employees recently gave a talk about the problems people signing up and staying at Twitter have. The most interesting takeway was this: What keeps people on Twitter is not what brings them here. First of all, Twitter is hard to learn. How [...]

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