Tweet Smarter

Problems with new Twitter features

Dave Larson — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:33:09 +0000

Twitter regularly introduces new features, or feature updates that are badly broken. Why is that? Some recent examples:

Twitter’s OAuth implementation: a study in bad decisions?

This morning, developer Ryan Paul detailed how Twitter “seriously botched its OAuth implementation and demonstrated, yet again, that it lacks the engineering competence that is needed to reliably operate its service.” Paul went on to say specifically that “Twitter should review the OAuth standard and take a close look at how Google and Facebook are using OAuth for guidance about the proper approach.”

Paul says Twitter’s approach is “a textbook example of how to do [OAuth] wrong.” He “received no response from Twitter after writing several posts outlining [his] concerns.” He points out that “The OAuth specification … says explicitly that implementors should not do what Twitter is trying to do.”

Moreover, Facebook and Google both do NOT take Twitter’s approach to the same situation. What’s an example of a kind of problem Twitter’s approach could cause? Hackers could put application makers (TweetDeck, HootSuite, et al.) “in a situation where their users are locked out for weeks when a key is compromised.” Paul demonstrates the problem by easily hacking a Twitter application. He also notes that Twitter’s approach to free and open source (FOSS) client software clients is even worse, a “really bad idea … because of Twitter’s misguided requirement”

Beyond the problem with hacked applications, Paul points out there are a number of OTHER “bugs, defects, and inconsistencies that pose challenges for users and developers.” And this isn’t the first time Twitter has demonstrated problems in introducing new features:

Official tweet button slows sites…

Twitter has implemented its official buttons in such a way as to prevent or slowdown sites from loading if using the new Twitter button when Twitter is having problems. As reported by TheNextWeb, user @tschellenbach shows how you can modify Twitter’s code to prevent your site from being affected by Twitter problems. I have implemented @tschellenbach‘s change on this site.

…and crashes browsers:

More dramatically, within 24 hours of being released, Twitter’s new tweet button for websites was briefly crashing browsers like Firefox, as widely reported:

A brief problem is not much of a problem, but who wants to have to keep checking to make sure the Twitter button isn’t crashing visitors’ browsers? Twitter acknowledged the issue in this tweet:

Twitter for iPhone crashes for a month

Most recently, Twitter for iPhone was updated…and version 3.0.2 promptly began crashing, failing to open, and having various other types of total failure. It took Twitter three weeks to provide a fix, which Apple took several days to approve. (The updated version is now in the app store here.)

Twitter for Android released with lots of bugs

Even as of early September these issues still were not resolved by Twitter:

Retweet works only from the home timeline and from nowhere else
The app force closes when scrolling the timeline
Cannot add @usernames in the Tweet. Says ”cannot get users names at this time, please try again latter” (later is misspelled as “latter”).
The “sync contacts” feature does not work.
Viewing private lists returns an error message.
Notifications don’t work and/or respect the notification volume.
Re-tweets from Private accounts can not be re-tweeted even if the original tweet is public.
Auto refresh does not work on Nexus ones and Droid with Froyo 2.1
Cannot delete search results on TwiAndroid

Facebook Blocks Twitter’s Way To Look Up Friends

This Facebook app made by Twitter was a big announcement, but as soon as they announced it…it stopped working. When the problem occurred, Twitter wasn’t in touch with Facebook for a couple of days. Eventually, Twitter posted

“Facebook has notified us that they have blocked the update to our application, and we are working on a resolution with them.” as reported on TechCrunch.

Why didn’t Twitter check with Facebook first, rather than later? The app turned out to violate a Facebook policy…that Twitter could have easily learned about beforehand.

Does Twitter have its act together?

This isn’t the first (or the second or the third) time they’ve announced a feature just before it stops working or has to be rolled back because it broke other things. Heck, even the second ad run by @EarlyBird had a typo in the discount code. Part of Twitter’s issue is admittedly that they are in the midst of an endless infrastructure change. The old joke about jumping off a cliff and having to build wings on the way down applies to Twitter pretty aptly. I agree Twitter can’t stop developing features that benefit its user base just because it has other teams working on infrastructure upgrades and problem resolution. But even though they have rolled a number of features out in limited release betas, they still end up too frequently having to go backwards due to issues found once they go into a full rollout. Also, as ReadWriteWeb points out, tongue-in-cheek: “Twitter has made numerous changes to fix its API. Those experiences have taught providers what mistakes not to make when launching a service.”

Is there a culture of carelessness at Twitter?

This is the company that got hacked because they let employees use passwords like “password” and “happiness” on important infrastructure—and the FTC went after them for being so easily hacked. Hopefully there is a key hire that has just not been made yet that will provide better oversight. Because to date, Twitter has a poor record. Since Twitter is already widely untrusted because the service is unreliable, you would think they wouldn’t introduce new situations that cause users to lose trust. But they at least appear to be avoiding problems like this one now: “Twitter timelines stopped updating hours ago. Why no word from the mothership?”

What do you think?

Would You Help a Twitterer In Need?

Dave Larson — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:10:46 +0000

Please help! The folks relying on us to help answer their Twitter questions need YOU.

We are going to be delayed in answering tweets for a few days, so here are some links you can check to find people that you can help: Search #1 – Search #2 – Search #3 (Twitter search sometimes doesn’t let you see more complex searches, so use whichever one works for you. Read on for what to do).

Could you do us a favor?

You can look through those searches listed above to find people asking for help. Would you then help anyone that you can? We normally answer many questions each day, but won’t be able to for a few days.

If you haven’t already, read this for places to check to get help with Twitter issues. Feel free to do this all the time, if you like! It’s more important to us that people get helped rather than who gets credit. Remember, anyone can request help directly from Twitter via http://bit.ly/twicket …always feel free to share this link a lot!

What to do when you find folks who need help

A great way to participate on Twitter is to help folks, so these tips are good anytime you’re looking for someone to help on Twitter

To see if someone has already been helped, click the “Show Conversation” link if there is one. It will show you the Twitter conversation (and change to “Hide Conversation”). Here’s what that looks like:

If you can’t figure out what they’re asking about, take a look at the tweet that they are replying to. To do this, first click the “View Tweet” link under their tweet to be taken to the webpage for that individual tweet. Then look underneath the tweet for the words “in reply to …” If you hover over those words they will change to a link you can click. Example:

Then you can read the tweet that they were asking about. Sometimes they didn’t reply to a tweet, so there is no link. And sometimes that makes it hard to figure out what they need help with!

Thanks, everyone!

And…apologies in advance: I’m going to retweet this blog post a few times because we could really use your help to see that people who need it get helped. We will still be tweeting (but a little less often) and checking some messages. Here are some example conversations we’ve had today:

Twitter: Has the novelty worn off?

Dave Larson — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:32:27 +0000

Twitter has made real-time information commonplace

Seeing information stream in real-time isn’t the novelty it used to be. Formerly something of great value, Twitter has made real-time information commonplace. We expect it now.

I’ve noticed a large drop in the number of people clicking through to read happening alongside an increase in the number of tweets and retweets. One very large account showed me how their clicks are down from a high of near 600,000/month earlier this year to barely 250,000/month today. And we’ve seen something similar happen to clicks on @TweetSmarter tweets. Urgent Twitter status notices, for example, used to get several thousand clicks, and are down to maybe a quarter of that.

I think part of the reason for the drop is that the novelty of seeing information in real time has worn off for longer-term users. The first few times you see tweets about celebrity deaths, they seem more retweet worthy than they do after seeing them for several years in a row. What do you think?

Another factor: Overuse

The tragedy of the commons parable says that popular resources open to the public can be over- or misused. At first they work well for a few people, but as more people use the resource, its value can be driven down or destroyed. Think of a stream that can provide water to a few people a day. If too many people arrive and start jostling in the river, the water could become muddy and not good for anyone.

A similar situation with Twitter is using it to find links to articles to read vs. sharing links for others to read. When everyone follows only a few quality people and no one overshares lower-quality tweets, Twitter is an easy-to manage resource for finding quality information. Of course, just sharing more tweets and following more people doesn’t HAVE to mean the quality goes down, but that is usually what happens. The more people you follow, and the more everyone shares, the harder it is to easily find relevant, high-quality tweets. The water is muddied with thousands of tweets.

Twitter tools come to the rescue to a large degree, allowing you to filter the tweets you see, or create Twitter Lists of fewer people tweeting more focused or higher-quality tweets. And there are other ways to manage finding tweets as well. But it has made using Twitter well a more advanced task than ever before. If you’re not careful, it can be less like a intimate party with interesting people and more like a riot with thousands of people shouting.

Alternate uses of Twitter

But alongside the growth in size and volume has come a growth in ways to use Twitter. It has become valuable in more ways than ever before. The purpose and value of Twitter is changing and becoming more varied. I think the reality of what we are seeing is simply that Twitter is growing up, becoming much more than a place to try to get people to read your blog, or find interesting links to follow and read. It’s still great for those things, but we would all be wise to make the most of it, and not find ourselves stuck in the past. What’s your take?

How to fix Twitter problems on your BlackBerry

Dave Larson — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:29:56 +0000

Websites That Help

First, realize that when you need help with your Blackberry Twitter application Twitter itself does not support any Twitter applications for Blackberry. It is Blackberry or helpful websites, forums or users you will need to reach out to for support. Also, there are some common tips and tricks listed a little further down in this blog posts. Here are some helpful websites to know of:

Blackberry’s official support sites

Blackberry user forums

Tips and Tricks for Common Issues

Thanks very much to @BBGeeks for this information. They are a great account to communicate with if you have a BlackBerry issue!

The “Incorrect Signature” error

This problem is related to the connection to a services api—if there is a glitch in the communication the error will occur. This can happen because an app is coded wrong…and can then only be fixed by an update from the app’s developers.

TRY THIS FIRST: Enable or disable wifi whenever the error pops up. This fixes the problem for some. If it continues, try one of the fixes listed below.

Battery pull fix for general issues

This is exactly what it sounds like. Remove and reinsert the battery on your Blackberry device to effect a reset.

Delete and reinstall fix

90% of the time, the “Incorrect Signature” glitch—and many other common issues—can be fixed this way. Make sure you know where to go to get the app you want, because you will need to reinstall it after deleting it!

Delete the app
Remove and reinsert the battery
Reinstall app
Remove and reinsert the battery

You’re done!

How to find your Outlook contacts on Twitter

Dave Larson — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:31:47 +0000

When you’re logged into Twitter’s web interface, you can find your friends on Twitter by their email address from https://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_contacts…but only if you have saved their email information in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or LinkedIn. Twitter doesn’t offer an option to upload and search your Outlook contacts. However, you can easily upload your Outlook contacts to a place Twitter can check them to find your friends.

Four steps and you’re done

Here’s what you do. Don’t worry—it’s actually pretty simple, just four steps:

Click here to get a free gmail account to put your contacts into for Twitter to scan. This is really fast and easy, so don’t be put off by it. Just use any nonsense name, but remember the username and password you create! (You can also use an existing gmail account, if you want to merge your Outlook contacts into it.)
Click here to download and install Google’s free new tool to export/upload your contacts into Gmail. Also much easier than you might expect. It also offers to upload your calendar and email, but deselect those options—they will fail anyway unless you are using and are familiar with an existing Google Apps account (which are different than Gmail accounts).
Run the tool to put your contacts into your new Gmail account. Now make sure you’re logged into Twitter.com and click here to go to Twitter’s find friends from contacts page.
Put in your new Gmail email address (UsernameYouMadeUp@gmail.com) and password into the boxes and click “Find Friends.” You’re done!

A big reason we started this blog was to be able to provide more detailed answers to the Twitter questions we get. @Amy Willis was the most recent person to ask us this question:

Tweet This Article

How to search old tweets: 10 tools, 20 features

Dave Larson — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:28:32 +0000

Twitter’s default search only goes back a week—if that—and often chokes on multiple keyword searches. Fortunately, there ARE many great alternatives, and I’ve included a chart comparing the nine top tweet search engines below. Here are links to each of the nine, in order of what I’ve found most useful to least useful for general tweet searches (however, some are powerful in other ways)):

I’ve added a brief review below, which I’ll expand later. Before I do, would you let me know of any other tweet search engines you’ve found? I’ll update the chart and this review to include them. Would you also let me know of any problems you’ve had using these search engines? Of course, there are tons of alternative Twitter search engines out there, with a wide variety of features. See, for example, 30 Twitter Search Alternatives & Tools. And many Twitter clients have advanced Twitter search options.

All The Ways You Can Search Old Tweets

Review of Tweet Search Engines

Searchtastic and Snapbird

First: Bookmark these two search engines! They are fantastic. And, sometimes one is running faster than the other one. These are the two best, no question. Searchtastic is often easier and faster for basic searches, but Snapbird is more powerful—and plenty fast most of the time. The options are pretty straightforward in both, so my suggestions is to play around with each of them. Note that you can search your DMs or any user’s favorites in SnapBird, and Searchtastic will export your search results to a spreadsheet. Great features!

BackTweets

This lets you see tweets that linked to any website address, e.g., see all the tweets that have included links to your blog. Twitter did not formerly offer this search service themselves, but now they do. But BackTweets will show you more results than Twitter’s search. Just paste any URL into BackTweets or search.twitter.com to see all the tweets that have included a link to that URL.

Topsy, Tweetboard & Friendfeed

These powerful tools are different from the others, and not search engines in the way you might expect. These three should all be part of your Twitter arsenal. Do this:

Apply to join the Tweetboard beta.
Sign up for Friendfeed so it will save your tweets,.
Start experimenting with Topsy.

I love how Tweetboard will show me conversations from nearly two years ago on Twitter. Topsy’s strength is showing you which are the most important links tweeted for a particular search. Some of the links we share from TweetSmarter every week are found by searching Topsy for “Twitter.”

Tip: When you are looking at search results in Topsy, note the options at the bottom of it’s left-hand column, and along the top of the page.

Google

REPLAY: Google has several ways to find tweets, but I don’t find any of them very useful. They had an experiment called “replay” that let you see how frequently words were being tweeted. Although it is officially over, you can still access the replay features here (as of August 11, 2010). Note the date links under the search box. Play with those to see different date ranges.

UPDATES: For any Google search you do, you can click “Updates” in the left column (you may have to click “more” to see the options) to restrict your search results to tweets. While the keyword search is advanced, you are restricted to searching all tweets from all users.

CUSTOM:You can search for tweets from specific users, but Google has been eliminating most tweets. They used to show you a LOT of tweets, now there are very few results returned. The way to achieve this search is to enter the following into the Google search box:

site:twitter.com inurl:”USERNAME/status” SEARCH TERMS

For example, here is how you would search for any tweets from @TweetSmarter that contain the word “followers”

site:twitter.com inurl:”TweetSmarter/status” followers

There are other ways to do this, but Twitter has changed its URL structure a bit, so this is now the most accurate.

LISTS: You can do a similar search for Twitter lists in Google, which appears complete. Read more by clicking here and scrolling down to the section “Comprehensive index of all Twitter lists…on Google”

TwimeMachine & TweetScan

You’ll probably find yourself using these least of all, because in each case there is another search engine that does it better. But let me know your experience!

Other tweet search engines

Know of others? Leave me a comment to let me know and I’ll update this post and credit you. I’ll be reviewing some of these in a future post:

Archive your tweets

There are a lot of services that you can subscribe to that will archive your tweets, and then there are options for searching them as well. If you haven’t signed up to any archive service yet, first join FriendFeed and let them save your tweets for you. I’m writing a separate post about tweet archive services that I’ll link to when it goes live, but in the meantime check out 10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets.

Was Twitter’s “Who To Follow” feature a mistake?

Dave Larson — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:58:58 +0000

Twitterers are being very vocal about how much they dislike the new “Who To Follow” feature on the Twitter website. In fact, a hugely popular article by @kitchenmage on how to block the “Who To Follow” feature has gone viral across Twitter.

Like it? Loathe it?

While I’ve heard from a few users who liked the new feature, many more have decided that “Who To Follow” is best described as “WTF.” In fact, I’ve heard a lot of different reasons people have for disliking it. Like it? Loathe it? Please click here and tell me why. Thanks!

24 hours of Twitter gratitude

Dave Larson — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 03:26:44 +0000

A commenter took me to task for possibly being a bad example of how to use Twitter. I started in on a long explanation (you can see it here) but then thought, I wonder what positive things people have said about us in the past 24 hours? So I took the time to check, and I was amazed!

We just don’t have time usually to respond to all the people saying nice things to us—answering questions and finding tweets takes all the time we have! But I thought it would be interesting to thank these folks in a blog post for all the support they’ve given us.

Here’s some of the positive comments I found about us in the last 24 hours:

Then there were these classy folks that just wanted to say thanks to us for the help we provided:

I didn’t bother to count the folks saying thanks for a retweet we gave them, or folks who thanked us by DM only.

So from us to all of you: Thanks, everyone! We love being here to help you. Tweet us anytime

–Dave and Sarah Larson

Who is @TweetSmarter?

Dave Larson — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 06:49:57 +0000

Dave and Sarah=@TweetSmarter
Photo by Jassie Kurr

There are a couple interviews with us on the web, so I thought I’d link to them and share some excerpts to give some background on us.

The Huffington Post (mid-2010)

This interview was titled “Live Free, and Tweet Smarter.” The interview was conducted by the wonderful 2morrowknight. Here are some excerpts:

TweetSmarter, a non-stop, 24-hour feed with news about all things Twitter, has been around for all of the the moments that have defined and shaped the identity of the site. Its influence is driven not by its high number of followers, or its impressive number of awards. People are excited about TweetSmarter because of its great content, and its willingness to share, assist, and empower. Its not just a news site, but in fact, a role model for how to be successful in social media.

You are about to begin your fourth year on Twitter as one of its most retweeted and respected accounts. Did you ever expect to have this type of success?

Our plan was to help as many Twitter users as we could.

In our non-Twitter life, we are working to set up free web services that help people help one another, and Twitter is an extension of that. Since everything we do is aimed at finding ways to help people, we figured we would eventually reach a lot of Twitter users. But we never expected to be one of the most retweeted accounts of all time! In fact, when TweetLevel — a tool rating users by influence — was released, it listed us as the third most influential user in the world. So, it’s been pretty amazing. But last year, when we had a tweet retweeted over 20,000 times for the first time, we knew were on to something.

What are your long-term plans? I asked this because the dynamic nature of your feed presents so many opportunities.

We’re here to help.

We’ve only recently started our Tweetsmarter blog, which we are using to expand the information we share on Twitter. We also like connecting people in the Twitter community together, and supporting useful Twitter projects, such as Chirrps. We expect to be able to increase our usefulness to the community by supporting more projects in the future.

You can read the rest of the interview here, which also covers our thoughts on such things as Twitter’s blueprint for profitability and efforts to improve service.

Twitterrati (mid-2009)

Mark Evans from Twitterrati.com interviewed both Sarah and I back when our Twitter account name was @Twitter_Tips. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:

Several years ago I had an idea for a new way people could work together that would be accessible to the majority of the world’s population, but I saw that it wouldn’t really fulfill it’s destiny unless a new kind of protocol or service arose that would compete with phone and email to allow people to share their status in short snippets on a real-time basis. When you realize that what I was thinking of describes Twitter almost to a tee, I have to admit it took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that Twitter was the service I had foreseen.

And when I say “forseen,” I don’t mean I knew this would happen. I just saw that if it existed, it could be the basis for a number of new ways for people to interact and enrich their lives. So in a very real sense, I’ve been working for several years on services that could be built using Twitter or something similar as their backbone.

You can read the rest of the interview here, which covers more about how we got started and began finding content to share.

Why you don’t always get credit for your tweets

Dave Larson — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:41:10 +0000

Sometimes we schedule a tweet from a popular website and then later hear from someone disappointed that we didn’t credit them when we tweeted the link.

They think that because they tweeted about it before we did—in some cases including our username in their tweet, such as “/cc @TweetSmarter”—that we found the tweet from them. We didn’t. When we DO find an article because of a tweet, we credit the person(s) who (re)tweeted it.

Tip: If you’re going to suggest a tweet, at least read our tweets to see if we’ve tweeted it already. We regularly get people asking why we haven’t retweeted their suggestion—when it was something we had ALREADY tweeted.

Where do we find things to tweet?

We don’t read every tweet with our username—we get too many retweets (100′s of thousands/year) and spammy callouts to make it possible to look at them all. We find most of the posts we tweet from custom searches looking for recent, relevant Twitter articles. Here’s an example of one of our Google searches, set to search blogs only for the last 24 hours:

twitter | tweep | tweet ”how to” | ~tip | ~tutorial | ~help | ~strategy -money

In fact several times a week, we add someone’s username to a tweet we have already found before we saw their tweet. That’s right—we give credit to someone who had nothing to do with the tweet. We do it because it actually saves us time from having to respond to a complaint later. Also even if there would be no complaint it prevents someone being disappointed.

What tweets do we look at?

In rough order of what we look at first:

DMs
Tweets that may include a question to us as described here
Tweets addressed to us, filtered to exclude certain users. Why filtered and not blocked? Among other reasons, some users who appear to have mental disorders sometimes write us many tweets all at once. (Yes, we have experimented in the past by replying to them.) Others are just “celebrity baiters”—always addressing miscellaneous banalities to users with a lot of followers.
Tweets that include our username that we just happen to notice. We scan other tweets with our username as time allows, and occasionally notice things that we respond to.

How do we schedule tweets?

Although many tweets go out within minutes of our finding them, typically 3-5 times a day we schedule a group of tweets.

On average, a tweet is scheduled 3-4 hours before it is actually tweeted. Only a few tweets are ever scheduled more than 12 hours in advance, and we very rarely schedule anything more than 16 hours in advance. We have tried many programs for scheduling tweets, including but not limited to HootSuite, SocialOomph, EasyTweets, FutureTweets and others. We sometimes use multiple interfaces to get around downtime on any one service.

Tip: You may want to check out 15 Free Twitter Tools For Scheduling Future Tweets.

Our strategy for scheduling tweets

Some of the guidelines we follow include:

Urgent or extremely timely topics we try to tweet immediately (such as info about new Twitter errors or downtime)
We try to tweet what is likely to be most popular at the time most people will see it. The time that something will be popular is completely dependent on our research of when OUR users respond, not when Twitter as a whole is most responsive. So a “hot tweet” that we find at a slow time of day we will delay tweeting until more people are likely to see it.
We sometimes delay our tweeting about extremely popular topics until a time of day that is well-read in another country. For example, if interesting but non-timely information comes out via @Mashable late afternoon U.S. time, we have found that our tweeting about it right away is redundant—most of our followers checking tweets at that time have already seen the story. We even get complaints! So we wait a few hours until more people are checking tweets in Australia and post the information then.
Tweets that got a lot of clicks or retweets we will sometimes repeat once (prefaced by “r/t “) at a less busy time of day within 8-16 hours after the original tweet went out.
Certain kinds of tweets (highly technical, business-oriented, humorous) are more popular at certain times of day, so we sometimes take that into account.

What about crediting authors of articles?

We rarely include the username of the author of a post in the tweet itself because we are already linking to the author’s article. Authors who want their usernames visible to readers should make them visible to readers of the post, and not rely on others to find and include their username in tweets. In general, anything that makes tweets shorter makes them get retweeted more frequently (which is what is most beneficial to the author anyway).

Should we suggest articles for you to tweet?

That’s actually a tough question to answer. We realize that with over 200,000 followers, MANY people are likely to have tweeted about something before we do.

First, realize that we only want tweets that are less than 24 hours old, preferably less than two hours old. But, people say, what if I have found something great that is a week old. IF you have looked at EVERY ONE of our tweets in the past week to KNOW that we have not tweeted it, and IF it is really a great tweet for us, then fine. But we’ve found people just send stuff and say “I don’t think you tweeted this.” In EVERY case so far, we DID already tweet it. EVERY case. Sometimes it is a very popular tweet that we have already planned to retweet once or twice more in upcoming months and so we tweet it and credit the person suggesting it, even though we already found and tweeted it several weeks previously. Again, we prefer harmony rather than explanations or rejections where possible.

Second, we only want suggestions for tweets that are urgent and timely, or very clearly about helping people use and benefit from Twitter. Yes, we tweet about social media in general and issues that affect large numbers of internet users. But we don’t want any help finding those tweets! Those are either easy to find because they are so generally popular, or sometimes just barely significant enough to be tweeted.

Third, we ALWAYS have some tweets scheduled in advance. The odds of you finding something that we haven’t seen or heard of already are not as high as you might think. Your best chance is to tweet us something just before we are doing one of our daily searches. But there is no set time we use, so it’s random luck when that happens.

But what if you are already sending us tweets? A few people do, and though it usually doesn’t help us, we mostly maintain a gracious silence. There are about one or two people in any given week that send tweets we are happy to see, totalling usually only 3-6 tweets altogether. One user is always sending us his own off-topic articles and saying things like “This is right up your alley!” Dude—it isn’t. And you’re obviously just self-promoting. Drop the hype. Why don’t we block him? Well, we have blocked many users like that. His is a borderline case. Again, this is someone we’ve given feedback to and he just doesn’t listen. We may yet block him.

We have tried a few experiments asking people to find tweets for us. Each time it has created more, not less work for us. It’s also a lot of work for our tweet-finders. They have to at least click and look at every one of our tweets to see if we have already tweeted something, unless they have found something ultra-current. What we have learned is that there are always people in any group who listen poorly.

We had one user we contacted six separate times (one document of guidelines, four emails, two DMs) about serious errors they were making in finding tweets for us in one of these programs. Errors such as suggesting things we had already tweeted, irrelevant tweets that had nothing to do with Twitter or relevant social media, etc. They never changed their tweets and we ended the tweet-finding program in order to stop dealing with this one person. Why didn’t we just end their participation? Because it was clear they weren’t listening, and any explanation we could give about why they were being rejected was also unlikely to be heard clearly. With an account as large as ours I’ve found maintaining harmony simply saves time. We are still planning to restart a program of folks who help us find tweets…but we won’t be inviting them to it.

Are we being a little too “nice?”

We have tried being more direct. We have blocked users who don’t listen when we ask them to stop what amounts to harassing us. We have sent clarifying emails, had others talk to them on our behalf, etc. We have repeated ourselves over a long period of time before eventually blocking or being more and more blunt. We have found that some people Just. Don’t. Get it. And more than once, we have groups—yes groups—of people contacting us saying “Why did you do that to ____?” Or hearing people spreading misinformation. Having experienced that enough times, we decided to be nice to almost everyone—because it’s easier. We do LIKE being nice to people, but we like even more making our lives easy (and peaceful).

And to those of you who makes our lives easy—we appreciate you more than you will probably ever know.